India’s rising star A Threshold wins the AR Emerging award for 2024

The newest AR Emerging award winner was formed by Avinash Ankalge and Harshith Nayak in Bangalore in August of 2020. They say their multidisciplinary focus is informed by a research-driven approach to designing structures that balance place, culture, and environment to produce an architecture which reflects its community’s aspirations while standing as a “place of memory” in deference to the vernacular.

They will receive a well-earned cash prize of £5,000 ($6,328 USD) after being selected from a 15-strong shortlist of their peers by a jury panel that included Geir Brendeland, the Bahrain-based architect and curator Noura Al Sayeh-Holtrop, and architect Adrian Lahoud. The jury lauded A Threshold’s subsequent “ability to educate their clients,” adding, “This practice has a point of view that is rooted in its local context and the traditions of India.”

Following them was the Chinese firm Chen Donghua Architects, the practice founded by the School of Architecture at South China University of Technology assistant professor Chen Donghua and a 2015 winner of the Chicago Architectural Club’s Burnham Prize. Judges praised their attention to shading details as contributing a “powerful idea in the context of global heating.” The judges added their favorable view of how the practice “works with economical means and lightweight structures to achieve maximum effect, [providing] a sense of poetry into everyday life.”

Finally, the winner of the editors’ choice Peter Davey Prize was announced as Material Cultures, a UK-based practice founded with a mission to foster a “transformation in architectural production.” The longtime editor of AR, Manon Mollard, explained: “Material Cultures’ commitment to decarbonising building practices has never been more important or urgent. The studio attends to the wider ecology of architecture: the landscapes from which building products are created, the pedagogy of construction techniques as well as material research.”

The awards were announced from Arup’s London offices.  Each took home a special trophy made from 100% recycled materials and designed by The New Raw, a Rotterdam-based studio specializing in robotics and plastics waste recycling.