Grafton Architects’ Town House building for Kingston University in London is among five finalists for this year’s EU Mies Award, which is given to the best building completed in Europe within the last two years.

The Stirling Prize-winning Town House at Kingston University by Grafton Architects is shortlisted for the EU Mies Award 2022 alongside Frizz23 by Deadline in Berlin, 85 Social Housing Units in Cornellà by Peris+Toral Arquitectes, The Railway Farm in Paris by Grand Huit and Melanie Drevet Paysagiste, and Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture in Haslet by Francesca Torzo.

Two finalists for the prize’s emerging practice category were also named: the Enrico Fermi School in Turin by BDR Bureau and La Borda – Cooperative Housing in Barcelona by Lacol.

The seven finalists for the EU Mies Award 2022 were selected from a shortlist of 40 European projects completed in the last two years, which included UK projects Second Home co-working space in Holland Park by SelgasCano and The Hill House Box by Carmody Groarke.

The EU Mies Prize winner and the Emerging Architect Winner will be announced at the end of April, with a ceremony to take place on 12 May 2022 at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona.

85 Social Housing Units in Cornellà by Peris+Toral Arquitectes

Architects statement:
The bases of this new residential building are a matrix of communicating rooms that eliminates corridors to guarantee optimum use of the floor plan and the use of timber to enable the industrialisation of elements, improved quality of construction and a major reduction of deadlines and C02 emissions.

The building is organised around a courtyard that articulates a sequence of intermediate spaces. On the ground floor, a porch opens up to the city, anticipating the doorway of the building and filtering the relationship between public space and the courtyard that acts as a small plaza for the community. The four vertical communication shafts are situated at the four corners of the courtyard so that all the occupants converge and meet in the plaza, which represents a safe space from a gender perspective.

Frizz23 in Berlin by Deadline

Architect statement:
Frizz23 is Germany’s first Baugruppe co-operative for cultural commercial space.

The architects adapted the Baugruppe model to create workspaces for arts, education and the creative industries. This innovative proposal won Berlin’s first concept based public land sales procedure. The architects then assumed the roles of developers to build the community of users for the project. 32 small companies and non profits threatened by Berlin’s rapid gentrification joined to secure their workspaces.

Inverting the process that developers normally follow, the architects first assembled the group around their programatic goals, and then designed the building in continuous dialogue with the users, the neighbourhood, and the city.

The Railway Farm in Paris by Grand Huit and Melanie Drevet Paysagiste

Architect statement:

Born from the desire of residents and local associations to see a place that combines urban agriculture and solidarity grow, the Ferme du Rail aims to integrate vulnerable people. It is part of the social fabric of the neighbourhood and generates a service activity and agricultural production, creating jobs. It is the eco-designed fruit of shared governance between operators and project managers during the five years of its development.

The farm offers emergency social housing and social reintegration of 15 social reintegration housing units, 5 social student housing units, an unheated productive greenhouse, a restaurant open to the public, a mushroom-growing cave and a permaculture garden. Its objective is to minimise the need for energy, food and financial resources by implementing a circular economy.

Town House at Kingston University in London by Grafton Architects

Architect statement:
Town House is located on the Penrhyn Road campus of Kingston University. The building’s educational vision and ethos is uniquely rich and progressive with unexpected adjacencies set up by virtue of the programme. The library facility is twinned with dance studios, performance and event spaces. The building is a democratic open infrastructure, a labyrinth of interlocking volumes, maintaining the feeling of being in one unified environment where these opposites can happily co-exist. Town House is a warehouse of ideas, and it’s façade seeks to establish it’s civic presence in terms of articulation and detailing, and in terms of relationship between façade and public space as appropriate to context. The transparency of the front façade draws open towards its centre revealing interlocking volumes moving vertically connecting from ground to top. There are no barriers.

Inspired by the progressive educational vision presented in the brief, and the wish to connect with the community, we responded by arranging the programme in a three dimensional matrix, one singular complex space which links the various elements of the brief, giving at the same time to each part its identity, a place where spaces and uses interlock, and connect physically or visually, creating an environment that encourages overlap and exchange.

Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture in Hasselt by Francesca Torzo

Architect statement:
Hasselt béguinage is alike a city in the city. The garden is enclosed by a wall of heterogeneous brick buildings, a place of rest. Z33 is part of this continuous border, as one building made of two: the 1958 existing museum and its extension. Alike the other buildings surrounding the garden, the extension building disposes a long and almost blind brick wall towards the street, echoing Roman opus reticolatum, and displays a score of windows towards the garden. The new wing interior scenography alternates rooms and gardens, offering a plurality of views and parcours similarly to what happens in a city; here rooms are specific in size, proportion and natural lighting, different from the existing wing classical setting, which has been appropriated as an ideal “white cube”. The slender section of the thresholds between spaces do not reveal the real thickness of the walls, so that rooms belong one to another.

La Borda – Cooperative Housing in Barcelona by Lacol

Architect statement:
The idea of a housing cooperative was born in 2012 as a project of Can Batlló driven by the community in the process of recovery of the industrial premises, and the neighbourhood and cooperative fabric of the Sants neighborhood of Barcelona.

The project is located on a public land of social housing, with a leasehold of 75 years. Located in Constitució Street, in a bordering position of the industrial area of Can Batlló with a facade to the existing neighbourhood of La Bordeta. The project aimed to redefine the collective housing program, while creating sustainable building and including user participation at its centre.

Enrico Fermi School in Turin by BDR Bureau

Architect statement:
The transformation of Fermi School is part of the initiative Torino Fa Scuola, which renovated two public secondary schools through the engagement of school communities in the definition of pedagogical guidelines, with the ambition to renovate both learning spaces and teaching methods.

The chosen school is an example of a widespread typology on Italian territory. The existing building had an interesting articulation of volumes, a poor relation with outer spaces and a series of underused interior spaces. Part of the strategy to reverse this condition lies on the reorganisation of accesses and external areas as to open the school to the city.

The new main entrance transforms the back of the building as a large, green, accessible, threshold space. The program is organised accordingly, favouring a continuous and controlled use of the building. The ground floor hosts activities open to the public while on the upper floors didactic units take place.