A ‘non-hierarchical’ university space that can be continually altered or even moved has won the EU’s biennial prize for contemporary architecture
A lightweight university study centre designed to be easily disassembled has won the prize for the best building in Europe. Longevity, permanence and a sense of immutability might be the ambition of most architects, but Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke would be delighted to see their building adapted and reconfigured, or ultimately dismantled and moved somewhere else altogether.
“We imagined the project as a changeable system,” says Düsing, co-designer of the new study pavilion for the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, which has been named this year’s winner of the EU Mies award (formerly the Mies van der Rohe award), the biennial European Union prize for contemporary architecture. “We wanted it to be a counter model to the university’s high-rise building and its conventional one-sided lecture halls. It’s more like an extension of the landscape that can be forever modified, a non-hierarchical space that the students can make their own.”
