On Tuesday, April 16, BUILD UP hosted a webinar organised by the NEBULA project on ‘Meet awardees of the New European Bauhaus Prizes’. The event dealt with the new European Bauhaus, sharing the insights and experience of three projects winner of NEB Prizes: Xifré's Rooftop, ERDEN Pure Walls and De Korenbloem.

The webinar was structured into five sessions. It started with an introduction on the NEBULA project made by Clémentine Coujard, Project Manager from Dowel, who gave an overview of the project.  ‘The main activities are ‘to foster the adoption of the New European Bauhaus principles, facilitate networking opportunities for innovators as well as set up a network of Innovation Cluster’, she highlighted. Her intervention was followed by an overview of the New European Bauhaus Prizes, made by Juan Pérez, Programme Coordinator from Tecnalia. Pérez explained that ‘there are three main values as part of the New European Bauhaus: sustainability, aesthetics, and inclusion. The NEB prizes give visibility to project and concepts that illustrate how the triangle of sustainability, aesthetics and inclusions can be developed in concrete examples’.

The three winners of the NEBULA Prizes

The first price has been awarded in 2021 to Xifré’s Rooftop: a heritage building rooftop in Barcelona. Sergio Carratalá, founder of the design studio MataAlta that worked on the Xifré project, explained that ‘the works to restore the architectural heritage have been carried out with the City Council of Barcelona with the purpose of combining architecture and ecology. This allowed to integrate the biophilic design in the construction, to deepen the connection with the natural environment by using direct nature’.  

The second price has been awarded as well in 2021 to Erden Pure Walls, a project from Austria. Martin Rauch, Managing Director at Lehm Ton Erde - the company that directed the Erden project -mentioned that ‘the idea behind the project is to build with rammed earth coming from the surroundings, by prefabricating blocks which will be used to build houses that are 100% natural and recyclable. The material is unstabilised because no cement is added to the mixture: this enables the walls to passively regulate indoor temperature and humidity’.

The third and final price was awarded in 2022 to De Korenbloem, a housing project for vulnerable residents in Belgium. Jan Vermeulen, Lead Architect at Studio Jan Vermeulen, explained that the project tackled the construction of a place for elderly to live and to be taken care for, introducing and linking the concepts of care and inclusion.