Beirut, 20 December 2017: In partnership with the American University of Beirut (AUB), Holcim Lebanon honored architects, engineers, planners and young graduates who participated in the 5th cycle of the LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction, in the presence of academics, business people and professionals in the construction industry.
The exhibition, hosted by the Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at AUB, showcased the various architecture and engineering projects in an effort to recognize the exceptional quality of projects and the record number of more than 50 submissions from Lebanon. A wide range of environmental, community and development projects, structural engineering, research and visionary ideas revealed the extent of diversity in approaching sustainable construction.
The 5th International LafargeHolcim Awards for the region Africa Middle East recognized eleven winning projects from nine countries, two of them from Lebanon, for their sophisticated and multi-disciplinary responses to the challenges facing the building and construction industry. As such, the event was designed to celebrate the two winning projects from Lebanon.
The Bronze Award in the Main category was received by the talented Joana Dabaj, Riccardo Conti and Matteo Zerbi of CatalyticAction, for their project “Pavilion re-claimed: Adaptive reuse for refugee education.” The design team made use of an abandoned pavilion from Expo 2015 in Milan and transformed it into a school for children at a tented settlement in the Bekaa area. The project is now a finalist in the Global LafargeHolcim Awards.
The 2nd prize in the Next Generation Category went to Nour Madi, Jad Melki and Ghaith Abi Ghanem for their project “Rubble Recycling Units in Aleppo.” The team proposed a non-classical approach to recycling concrete rubble from destroyed buildings of Aleppo”.