25 years of AR Emerging - The Architectural Review issue 1516

Architecture is a site of exchange, involving countless conversations between architects as well as an ecosystem of clients, craftspeople, builders, manufacturers and more. Sharing knowledge and experience across geographies and generations is central to the AR Emerging awards, which launched 25 years ago and grant early recognition to young architects around the world. Today, each edition brings together judges and finalists in productive in-person dialogue before an overall winner is chosen.

To celebrate a quarter-century of the AR Emerging awards, this issue features past finalists in conversation. The winner of the awards’ inaugural edition in 1999, Sixten Rahlff, speaks to John Lin and Joshua Bolchover about building in rural contexts in the global south. Rahlff’s winning project, designed while he was still a student, taught him the fundamentals of architecture, he says: ‘There are people, there are materials and there is the climate’. Carles Oliver Barceló, Christelle Avenier and Miguel Cornejo, meanwhile, discuss the power of architects to shift to ecological building systems for social housing. Anna Heringer and Nripal Adhikary talk about the slow democratisation of earth construction and the differences of practising in Nepal, Germany and Ghana.

This issue also features profiles of the 15 finalists of the 2024 AR Emerging awards, whose work tackles the numerous crises facing the profession and the planet. From careful strategies of repair to low-carbon materials research to the revival of ancient crafts, and from Cuba to Hungary to Taiwan, these practices face a similar reality: how to emerge in a world that is in need of new imaginaries.

1516: 25 years of AR Emerging

Read online | Digital edition | Buy now

Cover (above) George Douglas
The AR Emerging awards are an opportunity for exchange across geographies and contexts – the architects will meet each other and the panel of judges in London this month. The specially commissioned artwork by George Douglas that appears on this month’s cover captures this exchange, with each practice bringing their work to the table

Folio (lead image) Carlo Lavatori
Douglas’s artwork was partly inspired by the Italian designer Enzo Mari’s eclectic collection of objects, which he used as paperweights

Conversation
Negotiating the aid paradigm
Sixten Rahlff, John Lin and Joshua Bolchover

Conversation
Ecosystems of social housing
Christelle Avenier, Miguel Cornejo and Carles Oliver Barceló

Conversation
Building with earth
Anna Heringer and Nripal Adhikary

AR Emerging awards 2024

A Threshold
Reuben J Brown

Superposition
Oluwatobiloba Ajayi

Civil Architecture
Leela Keshav

NWLND Rogiers Vandeputte
Reuben J Brown

Déchelette Architecture
Leela Keshav

TYFA
Derin Fadina

Infraestudio
Oluwatobiloba Ajayi

Asif Khan Studio
Mir Jetha