For the first time, a national award for the best degree project in the area of residential architecture has been awarded, and the winner is Chalmers student Elin Holm for her work that highlights the importance and contribution of facades to the home and to the cityscape.
The CBA housing award for best student thesis aims to stimulate and increase awareness of good Swedish housing. The prize was awarded for the first time in November 2022 and the winner is architecture student Elin Holm, who graduated from Chalmers in June 2022, for her master's thesis: "Facades: more than a wall: investigating how to reach architectural qualities using different facade design principles". In her work, she examines the meaning and contribution of the individual facade to the urban space. and its simultaneous importance for the home environment.
The motivation for awarding Elin Holm is that her work constitutes "an important contribution to the ongoing discussion about facades and style", and "clearly shows that the facade is more than an exercise in style." The jury also find that Elin Holm's work "highlights the knowledge of the task of facade architecture, its complexity and role in the cityscape."
– Elin Holm's work has already received attention. Several architectural offices and clients have contacted us wanting to know more. It will be exciting to follow the development", says Ola Nylander, director at CBA (Centre for housing architecture) at Chalmers.
National collaboration behind the award
The prize is awarded by CBA and is based on a collaboration between teachers and researchers at the four Swedish schools of architecture at Chalmers, KTH, Lund University and Umeå University, who were also part of the jury. Each school has nominated a project, and among the four selected, the jury has then jointly chosen a winner who has been awarded a diploma and a prize sum of SEK 15,000. The other three nominated proposals is seen as runner's up, and were awarded SEK 3,000 each.
The student award will be an annual event at CBA's housing day, and the next time around will occur in the autumn of 2023, where the winner of the grand CBA housing award will be presented for the first time. Ola Nylander comments on what we hope to see among the nominations from the industry in the coming year:
– We want to see innovative projects with sustainability in focus and high quality in floor plans, material processing and details. We really need exemplary examples in today's housing construction, projects that show the way and that show that it is possible to build well, says Ola Nylander.
About the price:
Elin Holm's master's thesis
Other nominees:
More about the nominated contributions and the justifications as a whole can be found on the CBA website
Other nominees:
- Linnea Johansson, UMA Arkitektskolan
"SuperLine, a Framework for Domestic Urbanism" - Aloys Victor Heitz, Lund University
AI : Architects' Inferiority? - Mark Gavigan, KTH School of Architecture
"Caring about a Legacy of Care: Hökarängen"
More about the nominated contributions and the justifications as a whole can be found on the CBA website
Ola Nylander
- Full Professor, Building Design, Architecture and Civil Engineering