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As experts gather in Antalya, Turkey for the United Nations COP31 climate change conference, the nonprofit Climate Action Tracker is warning of devastating warming by 2100, and the EU reports that global warming has accelerated significantly since the 2015 Paris climate agreement, notes Inside Climate News.
Against this grim backdrop, New York’s Museum of Modern Art is announcing that it will give an annual grant totaling $200,000 in recognition of a single project by architects whose work is, as the award name has it, “nature-reconciled.” The prize comes with a $100,000 cash purse for the winner; it also includes another $100,000 that will go to a nonprofit organization to plant trees in the project client’s name. The prize is named the Ambasz-MoMA prize in return for a major gift from the Legacy Emilio Ambasz Foundation. It will recognize projects created anywhere in the world in the last three decades that “repair architecture’s relationship with nature,” as the museum puts it in press materials.
The museum bills it as the largest award for a single project in the field of architecture. The $100,000 cash component equals that of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which honors living architects for significant achievement. The full $200,000 award equals the Driehaus Prize, given annually by the University of Notre Dame to a living architect working in traditional and classical architectural forms.
An Argentinian-American architect, Ambasz has had a longstanding relationship with the museum, having served as a curator in the architecture and design department between 1968 and 1976. He has contributed over $20 million total to the museum, and has served on its International Council since 1978; he served on the board of directors at MoMA PS1 from 2002 to 2006. He has won architecture awards, including one for the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan.
In the inaugural year, Kashef Chowdhury/URBANA, an architecture firm based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, takes home the prize for its Friendship Centre, in Gaibandha, Bangladesh. Designed between 2008 and 2010 and completed in 2011, it is a training facility and meeting space for “underserved communities” in the flood-prone rural Jamuna River delta, which is also susceptible to earthquakes.
As the soil there cannot bear large weights, which would otherwise necessitate costly elevated foundations, the Friendship Centre instead employs a compacted earthen embankment to protect it from floods. It was built by hand almost exclusively with clay bricks made locally by area workers. Its form and style were inspired partly by the ruins of a monastery at nearby Mahasthangarh, the earliest known archaeological site and oldest city in the country, dating back to at least the third century BCE.
“The Friendship Centre has been in service to an underserved community for 14 years. Yet, it is not a building of 14 years of age, but rather 2,300 years of age, as it draws its inspiration for flood protection from the nearby third-century BC settlement of Mahasthan,” said Chowdhury in press materials. “We are delighted that its coexistence with the surrounding agricultural, rural landscape, without really showing its mass forms to adjoining villages, has been recognized in this important judgment.” Chowdhury established his firm in partnership with Marina Tabassum in 1995 and has been principal since 2005. He was the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the Friendship Centre in the 2014–16 cycle, as well as qualifying as a finalist for the same award in 2004 for A5, a pavilion apartment.
The Centre, which includes offices, classrooms, a library, meditation spaces, dormitories, and dining facilities. It also employs green roofs, open-air courtyards, and interconnected rainwater harvesting pools to moderate temperatures and provide natural ventilation. Mean temperatures can ranged into the mid-90s in April and May, with relative humidity averaging between 65 and 74 percent.
The other $100,000 will go to the Fundación Gran Chaco in Formosa, Argentina, which will contribute to reforestation efforts in the Gran Chaco forest in honor of Friendship, the NGO founded and directed by Runa Khan, who commissioned the Friendship Centre.
The Friendship Centre was chosen from a pool of nearly 140 projects, developed through research by the Ambasz Institute along with nominations by 30 international experts nominating candidates from their own regions.
The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment was established in 2020 and is housed in MoMA’s department of architecture and design. It organized the 2023–24 exhibition “Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism.” e-flux wrote that “the exhibition imagines an alternative American future where nature is in harmony with human settlement—technologically, aesthetically, and spiritually,” and called it “a brilliant cross-section of architectural innovations as they were developed.”
“This inaugural prize marks an important extension of the Institute’s research beyond the Museum, recognizing exemplary architectural practice while supporting tangible environmental action,” said Evangelos Kotsioris, director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute and an architecture and design curator at MoMA, in press materials. “By honoring Kashef Chowdhury/URBANA’s extraordinary work on the Friendship Centre, the inaugural Ambasz–MoMA Prize recognizes an architecture that brings together environmental adaptation, historical continuity, and an extraordinary sensitivity to the communities it serves.”
Serving on the inaugural prize jury along with Kotsioris were Martino Stierli, chief curator of architecture and design, and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, assistant curator of architecture and design. Two distinguished external jury members—Shelley McNamara, of Ireland’s Grafton Architects and Wang Shu, of China’s Amateur Architecture Studio—joined the museum’s jury.