Barcelona hosts EUmies Architecture Awards ceremony

The award ceremony for the EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture took place in Barcelona on Tuesday. 

Architects Elena Orte and Guillermo Sevillano of SUMA Arquitectura received the Emerging Architecture prize for their project at the Gabriel García Márquez Library in Barcelona. 

Meanwhile, Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke were awarded the 2024 EUmies Architecture Award for the Study Pavilion on the Campus of the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany.

The ceremony took place in Barcelona's Mies van der Rohe building, with local and European authorities present.

Back in April, when the jury selected the Barcelona library for the prize, they highlighted that the library "acts on a city-wide scale, contributing to the transformation of the neighborhood, opening up as a new outdoor and indoor public space."

When the awards were first announced, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Iliana Ivanova, highlighted that the chosen winners bring “the green transition into people's everyday lives and living spaces." 

Six-story library

Last August, the Gabriel García Márquez Library was named the world's best public library built in 2022 by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). The building's sustainable strategies have granted it the Gold LEED award for green buildings.

Located in Barcelona's working-class Sant Martí district, the six-story library specializes in Latin American literature and is the city's third-biggest. The library's 4,000 m² are spread over six floors with an exposed wooden structure. 

Top Architecture exhibition

Aside from the awards ceremony, the EUmies Awards Day in Barcelona also includes an exhibition, guided tours, and the EUmies Awards Talks, with the participation of the winners, finalists, jury members, and clients, those who made the works possible. 

The exhibition is held in the Palau Victòria Eugènia exhibition hall in Fira de Barcelona and showcases the 362 nominated works that impressively detail the best in European architecture over the past two years.

These works, spanning 38 countries and 240 different locations, are located at unique points in the northern hemisphere of our planet. Following the Earth’s meridian, the works form a map of the EUmies Awards 2024, from the icy landscape of Greenland to a subtropical banana grove in the Canary Islands. 

After Barcelona, the exhibition will embark on its tour around Europe, opening in Madrid at the Casa de la Arquitectura in July and at Vienna's Architecture Museum in October. 

The EUmies Award ceremony marks the start of the Barcelona Architecture Weeks. Between May 14 and June 28, there will be more than 180 activities open to the public and aimed to promote knowledge of contemporary architecture and its values available in person and online.