Winners were chosen by a jury of experts in architecture, design, and engineering: Canadian architect John Patkau, Architecture 2030 Challenge founder Edward Mazria, energy efficient building design expert Thomas Auer, Front Inc. founding partner Michael Ra, Yale architecture professor Michelle Addington, and UCLA architecture professor and founding director of CityLAB Dana Cuff. Zerofootprint founder and CEO Ron Dembo made the announcement last week at the U.S. Green Building Council’s Greenbuild International Conference and Expo.
The purpose of the competition, said Zerofootprint, is to jump-start the discussion about how we might retrofit entire cities, improving our older, existing stock of buildings to fight climate change. “Re-skinning will become the most important design task for the next decades, if we want to seriously reduce our greenhouse gas emissions,” said juror Thomas Auer.
Winners and finalists are listed below with links to the projects:
Best Overall Project & Best Residential
The Palms, a house in Venice, California designed by Daly Genik Architects, won this year's top prize. The most notable feature of The Palms is a sheer white exoskeleton made from locally sourced recycled steel, which transformed the look of the house and expanded the outdoor living space without increasing the site’s footprint.
