Overview 2ACAA 2019
Editorial of 2A Magazine issue 44 – Ahmad Zohadi

2A Magazine as organizer of 2A Continental Architectural Awards hope to achieve a broad goal. Which is bringing architecs to present their ideas, offer a forum for all architects around the Globe in order to expand and enrich their architectural vision, sharing ideas from various origins and contextual analysis and studies.
The participation of various arcitects and urban designers in this 2A continental architectural award , who present and describe different architectural methods and viewpoints about architecture and urban designing from vaious parts of the world , helps to achieve the following advantages and objectives.

• Getting to know the regional strength and capabilities , and learning about the possibilities of linking it with various credible viewpoints in different parts of the globe.
• Dialogue among architects which gives them the chance to present and share their ideas and views , and also to see the effects of their views on one another, and give them a great opportunity for better understanding of architectural space.
• The attending Architects and Artists from various continents, gain a social and cultural understanding about one another. And furthermore the presentation of their projects at the exhibition and their participation in the Interaction forum helps them to get better acquainted and eventually lead to more future communication and interaction.
• It is worthy to note that the continental architectural award is the reflection of viewpoints that helps everyone to better observe and undrestand the value of architecture and space in the geographical , cultural and economic context , and in doing independently evaluate and introduce each continet’s position and contribution to architecture and urban design.
  2ACAA is a landmark and turning point allowing practitioners to pause and reflect upon what the continents, as a part of global community have achieved in the field of architecture.

 

Overview 2ACAA 2019
Ahmad Zohadi

 

The following report briefly outlines the structure of the 2A Continental Architectural Awards. Articulating the process and the considerations made to select the candidates’ projects.

Broad Objectives of the Award
The 2019 2A Continental Architectural Award is an open Award for anyone from the international architectural community who have designed or built a project during or after the year 2010.
The award announcement was published broadly in numerous architecture publications and other media outlets to invite individuals or groups to participate.

The theme of this year’s award was “Innovative Contextual Architecture in the continents”. Accordingly, the Award recognized an individual or group’s substantial contribution to today’s architecture in the World in terms of contemporary challenges in the field, which have a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture.
2A Magazine, the organizer of the award, has always emphasized on unique regional distinctions, rather than global modernism in architecture. Accordingly, this award provides a context for recognizing and highlighting the essence of architecture in each continent beside presenting it to an international audience.

Detailed Judging Criteria
The organizing committee set up a two-stage judging process and detailed judging criteria based on the award announcement.
These were distributed to the jury members to solicit their feedback. The award criteria were also published on the website. The organizing committee developed a detailed set of guidelines for the jury members to use when evaluating projects and distributed it to them in advance of the judgment process. In the online review, the criteria were displayed on every page.

Criteria for all Categories:
-Design achievement
– Technical advancement, including engineering achievements (structural, mechanical, etc.) and innovative use of materials
– Reflection of sense of place, ecology, environmental sustainability and cultural identity
– Social responsibility, community, and urban connectivity
– The effects of economic conditions on the project
– Contextual analysis and study
– Technical advancement, including engineering achievements (construction detail, structural, mechanical, etc.)
– Innovative use of materials and experimentation with new materials
– Social and economical responsibility

Judging Process
The award review have a two-stage process, blind review and discussion review.(Figure 1)

Blind Review with Online Scoring
In this stage, two PDF files and a project description for each entry, and consider them based on the general goal of the prize. The purpose of the contest was to locate and highlight contemporary urban, landscape, and architectural works in the continents whose innovative characteristics epitomized the Search for Asian, European, African, South and Central American And North American Spirit in Architecture, and who contributed to a new direction and order for the cities in the continents.
Based on the judging criteria, each project could pass. Each was reviewed and evaluated with other projects in the same category. Although the majority of the evaluation criteria were standard among all categories, each category’s submissions were evaluated separately.
The organizer has presented the candidate projects for the next stage.