International competition for the Bamiyan cultural centre in Afghanistan

International competition for the Bamiyan cultural centre in Afghanistan

Carlos Nahuel Recabarren, Manuel Alberto Martinez Catalan and Franco Morero are the winners of the international competition for the design of the Bamiyan Cultural Centre in Afghanistan. An international jury selected them from among 1070 projects submitted from 117 countries. The competition was launched in November 2014 with the support of the UIA, which was represented on the jury by the Korean architect Young Joon Kim.

According to its authors, the winning project, entitled Descriptive Memory: The Eternal Presence of Absence tries to create not an object-building but rather a meeting place,” inspired by “ancient local building traditions,” where communication and exchange will take place with on minimal impact on the environment and which will be totally into the landscape.

The jury acclaimed the exceptional qualities of the project from the Argentinian team: the distribution of space and the inclusion of all elements of the program, the subtle strategy of implementation resulting in an elegant entry sequence, the insertion of the building in a landscaped garden and the creation of interior spaces and passageways serving as informal meeting spaces. The jury also selected the project for its appropriate scale and the feasibility of its construction.

. Ahmet Balkan, Emre Bozatli, Turkey

. Noel Dominguez, Agathe Culot, Anna Kampmann, Alexandre Ferron, France . Costas Nicolaou, Constantinos Marcou, New Zealand . Graham Baldwin, Alessandra Covini, The Netherlands

Thanks to generous financial support from the Republic of Korea, UNESCO, in partnership with the Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture is going to proceed immediately to the construction of the Centre, which will be built near the Bamiyan archaeological remains, a World Heritage property. The Afghan President H.E Ashraf Ghani has endorsed the international architecture competition as a project selection procedure. He confirmed the choice of jury members and renewed his commitment to the protection of his nation’s cultural heritage.

All submitted projects will be visible online on the competition site during the month of March.

To view a video of the jury meeting: http://youtu.be/laxQeqRZkjI To find out more: http://bamiyanculturalcentre.org/news/