2016 Ninth Cycle Announcement
Introduction
Omrania and Associates (O&A) and the Center for the Study of the Built Environment (CSBE) are happy to announce the 2016 ninth cycle of the Omrania l CSBE Student Award for Architectural Design.
The Award is intended to honor distinguished architectural graduation projects by students from universities throughout the Arab World.
Eligibility
Students who have completed their Bachelor's degree in architecture or architectural engineering during the 2015 – 2016 academic year from universities in countries belonging to the Arab League are eligible to submit their architectural graduation projects for the Award. The Award is open to all design approaches to architecture.
The Award’s total prize money is USD 15,000. It will be at the discretion of the Award jury to decide on the number of winners and on the distribution of the prize money among them. For the 2015 Award cycle, the Award jury selected two groups of winning projects: a group of three equal first-place winners, and a group of three equal second-place winners.
Registration
All participants may register online through the Award website (www.omraniacsbeaward.org) by creating an account with a user name and password, and filling and completing the online Submission Form. The Submission Form will be made available online for participants on June 25, 2016.
Submission
Submissions must consist of the student’s submission for the final year graduation project. No additional work may be done to the project except for re-formatting it to match the following required specifications.
Submissions must consist of:
Abstract of no more than 100 words
All participants must provide a clear and concise statement of no more than 100 words describing their project. The statement must be typed and filled in the assigned box online at the Award website. The statement may be adapted from a text already developed for the graduation project. Abstracts that exceed 100 words in length will not be accepted.
One digital portrait sheet (file format: JPG; sheet Size: A0 (841x 1189 mm); file resolution: 150 dpi; file size: under 10MB)
- No additional sheets will be accepted.
- The digital sheet must be anonymous and shall not display the name of the participant, the participant’s university, or any other identifying marks.
- Since the participants will not be able to present their work in person to the jury members, it is permitted – though not required – to add a few short notes onto the sheet to explain significant aspects of the design. Submitting a digital sheet with a clear and simple presentation is highly encouraged.
- Participants should keep an empty white-strip (50x 841 mm) without images, drawings, or notes at the bottom of the submitted sheet.
Formal Certificate of Graduation
All participants shall provide a copy of a formal document that certifies their completion of a Bachelor’s degree in architecture or architectural engineering during the 2015 – 2016 academic year. The certificate must be submitted along with the abstract paragraph, the drawing sheet, and the submission form. The certificate may be any university-issued formal document that verifies the participant’s graduation. It must be submitted / uploaded in JPG or PDF format.
All submissions must be uploaded to the Award website between June 25, 2016 and August 25, 2016.
Applicants will receive a confirmation email within three business days of the successful receipt of the submission material.
The names of the participants, as well as any other identifying details, will remain hidden from the jury members until after the jury has made its final decision.
All the submission items mentioned above may be provided in either Arabic or English.
Disqualification
The Award team fully reserves the right to disqualify participants for any reason it sees fit. For example, if: i) participants do not meet the eligibility criteria for participation in the competition; ii) participants communicate with the competition organizers or jurors in an attempt to influence the judgment of competition entries; iii) entries do not satisfy any of the above-mentioned requirements for submission.
More details on the eligibility and disqualification, as well as the registration and submission process are available on the FAQ section.
Evaluation
An independent three-member jury will review the entries and select the winners.
The jury will evaluate the submissions on their stand-alone merit. In doing so, issues such as clarity of presentation, creativity, design excellence, social responsiveness, function and program, etc. will be taken into account.
The jury’s decision will be final, and the jury has the right to decide on the number of winners and on the distribution of the prize money among them.
Jury members of the Award’s 2016 ninth cycle
Róisín Heneghan
Róisín Heneghan is an Irish architect and designer. She is cofounder of Heneghan Peng Architects along with Shi-Fu Peng. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University College of Dublin, and her Master of Architecture degree from Harvard University.
She has taught at numerous institutions including University College Dublin, Cornell, MIT, Yale, and Harvard.
She won the Architectural League Prize (previously known as the Young Architects Forum) in 1999, and was nominated twice (in 2015 and 2013) for the RIBA Stirling Prize.
Heneghan's numerous projects include the Grand Egyptian Museum, Palestinian Museum, Giant's Causeway Visitors' Centre, Central Park Bridges at the London Olympic Park, School of Architecture at the University of Greenwich, and the Canadian Canoe Museum.
Ammar Khammash
Ammar Khammash is the principal architect and founder of Khammash Architects in Amman. He received his Bachelor's degree in Architecture from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1986, and carried out post-graduate studies in Ethno-archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at Al-Yarmouk University (1987 - 1988).
Khammash's work features a wide range of residential, cultural, renovation and restoration, sustainable tourism, planning, and destination design projects. They include the Royal Academy for Nature Conservation in Ajloun (2014), the Feynan Eco-Lodge in Wadi Feynan (2002), and the Wild Jordan Nature Center in Amman (2001).
He is well established as an expert in Jordan's cultural and natural heritage, and has launched a number of websites on Jordan's flora, geology, and heritage. His expertise spans over different disciplines including history, geology, archaeology, ecology, botany, ethnography, and socio-economics.
He is the author of a number of publications including Notes on Village Architecture in Jordan (1986). He is also an established painter and has held more than twenty art exhibitions. His art work has been published in Ancient Landscapes: The Landscape Paintings of Ammar Khammash (2009).
Mohsen Mostafavi
An architect and educator, Mohsen Mostafavi is the Dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design. He was formerly
Dean of the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University, and Chairman of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.
He has taught at numerous institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, University of Cambridge, and the Frankfurt Academy of Fine Arts (Städelschule). Dean Mostafavi also has served on the steering committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the design committees of the London Development Agency (LDA) and the RIBA Gold Medal.
He has edited and co-edited a number of publications, the more recent of which include Ecological Urbanism (2010, and recently translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish); Implicate & Explicate (2011); Louis Vuitton: Architecture and Interiors (2011); In the Life of Cities (2012); Instigations: Engaging Architecture, Landscape, and the City (2012); Architecture Is Life (2013); Nicholas Hawksmoor: The London Churches (2015); and the forthcoming Ethics of the Urban: The City and the Spaces of the Political.
Award and Exhibition
The winning projects will be declared at an Award ceremony. The location and date of the ceremony will be announced at a later date. The winning projects and a selection of submissions will be exhibited immediately after the Award ceremony and for a few days following it. The winning projects will also be published on the Award website and on the Award’s dedicated social media channels.
The Award will cover travel and accommodation expenses for winners from outside the country where the ceremony will be held. Should any of the winning projects be the product of a group effort, the Award will cover the expenses of one representative from the group. The Award ceremonies so far have been held in Amman, Manama, Beirut, and Sharjah.
The Award will also cover travel and accommodation expenses for the instructors who supervised the winning projects from the countries of the universities where they taught during the relevant year of the Award cycleto where the ceremony is held. Should any of the winning projects have more than one supervising instructor, the Award will cover the expenses of one instructor.
Inquiries and Updates
For additional inquiries, please call CSBE at (962) (6) 461-5297 or send an email to info@omraniacsbeaward.org. All developments regarding the Award will be posted on the Award web site and on the Award’s dedicated social media channels:
Facebook: Omrania.CSBE.Student.Award
Twitter: @graduateaward
If you wish to be informed of any updates on the Award, please provide us with your email address.
Note: Detailed information on the Award’s previous eight cycles (including winning projects, biographies of jury members, and jury reports) are available on the CSBE website (www.csbe.org) and on the Award website (www.omraniacsbeaward.org). All submitted projects for the 2010 and 2011 cycles of the Award may be viewed on the Award's Facebook page. All projects submitted for the 2012 - 2015 cycles of the Award may be viewed on the Award website.