Jury Report: 17th Memar Award

The 17th Memar Award ceremony was held in October 2017. The winners, honoured, and finalist projects are presented in this issue.

The competition of the 17th Memar Award was held with 311 submitted projects in two rounds. In the first round, from among the projects that had submitted their documents, 134 projects advanced to the semi-final stage and were asked to submit their documents for the second round of judging.

The second round of judging was held on 15 and 16 Mehr 1396 (7–8 October 2017) with the jury panel of Hossein Sheikh Zeineddin, Reza Daneshmir, Ali Kermanian, Rambod Ilkhani, and Zhi Wenjun from China. On the first day of the second round, the jurors selected 60 projects as finalists from the 134 semi-final entries. On the second day, after discussion and dialogue on the finalist projects — whose report you will read on the following pages — they selected 25 projects as winners and honoured entries.

Judging Criteria

• Creativity and innovation in design, and innovation in the use of building materials and technology.
• Creative response to specific project challenges, including economic constraints, special site conditions (dimensions and proportions), legal regulations and procedures (especially urban codes), technical difficulties, and the like.
• Precision and innovation in detail design.
• Attention to the surrounding environment and climatic conditions, environmental values, and social commitments.

It goes without saying that the final judgement of each project is reached not by scoring it against each of the above criteria and averaging the scores, but through a holistic judgement of the project as a whole.

Judging Method and Procedure

All projects were divided into four groups — Residential Apartment Buildings, Residential Individual Dwellings, Public Buildings, and Renovation — and the following stages were followed for the projects in each of the four groups:

1. All works of the same group were displayed together for the jurors to view. After viewing all of them, works that all jurors marked as rejected were set aside. Even if a single juror argued for keeping a work, that work was not set aside. Each juror used a sheet of coloured stickers in their own colour, with each sticker in this stage representing their negative vote on a project. The remaining projects advanced to the semi-final stage.
2. From among the semi-final projects, each juror selected the top projects of their choice — without ranking, using their own coloured sticker which at this stage signified a positive vote. Projects that no juror selected as a top entry were eliminated. The selected projects were considered the finalists.
3. Each juror separately chose their first, second, and third ranks from among the finalists. 3 points were assigned to first place, 2 points to second, and 1 point to third. The sum of all jurors' points determined the first, second, and third winners.
4. The jurors could declare some of the finalists worthy of special honour. With agreement among the others, this title became final. The tables below show the results.

Voting Results — Winners

Detailed jury discussions for each of the winning, honoured, finalist, and semi-finalist projects are presented in the corresponding sections that follow.