10th Memar Award: Jury Report

The End of a Decade — Soheila Beski

The ceremony for the tenth anniversary of the Memar Award brought to a final point a decade of the award. This was literally a final point, because if the Award is to be continued, it can no longer be done like the past ten years. The selection of five jurors, all of whom are successful architects practicing outside of Iran, was a nice ending to this ten-year-long experience.

Some changes will be applied in next year's award:

1. The Award will include three separate categories for Residential projects, Public projects, and Restoration/Rehabilitation projects. Further division of these categories (for instance the division of the Residential category into single-family houses and large-scale complexes) will be done by the jury if necessary.
2. Given the change in the jurors of each period of the Award, projects that have previously participated in the competition but have not received a prize will be allowed to resubmit in future periods of the competition.
3. The jury for each period will preferably include a combination of Iranian architects and designers from abroad.
4. The 100-sec. film will be eliminated from the list of required materials. Instead a questionnaire will be added to help in collecting all the required data about a project. Projects that do not submit all the required materials (images, drawings, questionnaire) will be eliminated from the competition. A technical committee will review the submitted documents prior to the jury sessions.
5. The total prize money for the Award is 450,000,000 Rials, which the jury will divide among the winners at their own discretion.
6. Semi-final, finalist, or prize-winner projects will be published in Memar Magazine.

10th Memar Award — Kamran Afshar Naderi

The 10th edition of the Memar Award was an occasion to take stock of a decade of contemporary architecture in Iran. The results of the assessment of the participants' works, the jury deliberations, and the professional conversations around the award all confirmed the founding beliefs and ideals of the Memar Award — among them the constructive role of the younger generation in Iran's contemporary architectural culture, the importance of transparency and the independence of the jurors' vote, and the effect of competitions and architectural contests in raising the country's culture of architecture. The 10th edition of the Memar Award, like the ten that preceded it, instilled positive energy and an exceptional dynamism in its contestants, the competition itself and its organisers — enough to turn it into a moment of inflection in the history of the award and of contemporary Iranian architecture.

Kamran Afshar Naderi identifies the factors differentiating the best projects of this year's Memar Award:

• Clear and simple volumetric expression
• A reduction in the qualitative differences between projects in Tehran and those constructed in other cities
• New experiences in using both modern and traditional building materials
• Advancement in the quality of construction and architectural detailing
• Coherence between various architectural elements, and between the elements and the totality of the building
• Less decoration and unnecessary ornamentation
• More attention to the role of the movable parts of the building in creating space
• Priority of spatial expression over volumetric expression
• More attention to the expressive qualities of materials, colors, and textures
• More attention to the influence of both natural and artificial light on space
• More attention to sustainability and environmental issues
• More attention to the relationship between the exterior and interior
• An attempt to connect with architectural traditions through invention and reinterpretation of those traditions
• More attention to the importance of art in increasing the quality of life, despite budget limits

Report on the 10th Edition — Sanam Kalantari

The call for entries for the 10th Memar Award appeared in Issue 61 of Memar Magazine (June 2010). The jury for this edition consisted of five successful Iranian architects practicing outside of Iran: Hadi Tehrani (director of Hadi Tehrani Architectural Office, Hamburg), Nader Tehrani (Head of the School of Architecture at MIT), Gisue Hariri and Mojgan Hariri (Hariri & Hariri Architecture, New York), and Nasrin Seraji (director of Atelier Seraji, Paris/Vienna; Head of the School of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna).

The deadline for submissions was set at 12 October 2010. A total of 144 entries were submitted, of which 2 were eliminated for non-compliance with the call. Of the remaining 142, 93 projects were in the Residential Buildings group and 49 in the Public Buildings group. Within Residential, 55 projects were single-unit houses, 24 were mid-size buildings, and 14 were large-scale complexes. The submitted projects also included 6 restoration/rehabilitation projects and 24 interior renovations.

The jury sessions were held on 16 and 17 October 2010 at the office of Memar Magazine. In the first round, 13 projects from the Residential Buildings group and 10 projects from the Public Buildings group were selected as semifinalists. In the next round, 6 projects from the Residential and 4 from the Public groups were chosen as finalists, and in the final round the first to third places in each group were awarded, alongside 2 Certificates of Merit in the Residential group and 3 in the Public group.

Residential Buildings Winners

1. First Place: Ramin Mehdizadeh — Residential Apartment No. 1, Mahallat (Memar Award trophy + 100,000,000 Rials cash prize)
2. Second Place: Ehsan Hosseini and Elham Geramizadeh — Bidabad House, Isfahan (30,000,000 Rials cash prize)
3. Third Place: Reza Najafian and Reza Mafakher — Apartment No. 17, Tehran (20,000,000 Rials cash prize)

Public Buildings Winners

1. First Place: Ali Sodagaran and Nazanin Kazerounian — Persian Aqua-Structures Museum, Shiraz (Memar Award trophy + 100,000,000 Rials cash prize)
2. Second Place: Lida Almassian and Shahin Heidari — Self-Service Restaurant, University of Sistan & Balouchestan (30,000,000 Rials cash prize)
3. Third Place: Farrokh Zanouzi, Nariman Pirasteh Boroujeni and Mohammad Arab — Conversion of a Ruined House to Bavand Consulting Engineers Office, Isfahan (20,000,000 Rials cash prize)

The ceremony for the 10th Memar Award was held on Friday 22 October 2010 in the Abgineh Hall of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Club Complex. The programme opened with the reading of an editorial by Sanam Kalantari [corrected: Soheila Beski], the managing director and editor-in-chief of Memar Magazine. The financial sponsor of the ceremony was Superpipe International. A certificate of appreciation from Memar Magazine was presented to Mehrdad Yousefi, the CEO of Superpipe; the programme then screened a short film titled "Suspension" for those present.

The ceremony also recognised, with a certificate of appreciation from Memar Magazine, the directors of large and successful projects. The honourees were: the CEO and Deputy Director of Tehran Metro; Morteza Bank and Hamidreza Nikkar (in charge of the Iranian embassy projects abroad during the past years); the CEO, Deputy and Technical Deputy of the Cultural Spaces Development Company (for managing the cinema projects in Tehran that had previously won placements in earlier rounds of the Memar Award); Naghsh-e-Jahan-Pars Consulting Engineers (for project management of the National Museum Palace); Seyed Mohammad Beshti and Mr. Taghizadeh-Asl (for launching and implementing major parts of the Hamadan Cultural Heritage Pardisan project); Kambiz Poshtiban, CEO of Khak-e-Salimi Company, and Gholamreza Pasban-Hazrat, CEO of Bafte-Shahr Consulting Engineers (for the Modarres Highway façade project); and Parvin Dorshouri and Houshang Fathi (for environmental and cultural projects on Qeshm island).