2024 Gold Medallists announced | Architecture Now

Individually and collectively, Hugh Tennent and Ewan Brown have travelled generally prevented pathways. They’ve prolonged themselves past the sides of typical remark and understanding that sometimes inform the architectural response. As people and collaborators, they perceive the interconnected nature of individuals, place, setting. Their very own deep, inner inquiry informs their outward expression.

Main a apply on the vanguard of radical sustainability, of exploring bicultural collaboration, of incorporating te ao Māori into design, their ground-breaking tasks present us how one can form a constructed setting that advantages us all.

These two looking hearts and minds got here collectively in 2003. Constructing Tennent Brown Architects on the foundations of fairness and social justice, they’ve developed small, extremely expert groups able to attaining massive, complicated tasks. In 2018, the apply turned a founding member of The Variety Agenda and was the primary in Aotearoa to acquire a JUST label for Social Justice. In 2022, their apply turned the primary in Aotearoa to attain B-Corp Certification.

Early adopters and danger takers, Hugh and Ewan have sustained a constant values-based imaginative and prescient that has progressively turn into extra influential. Their work exhibits us the obligations we face as a occupation and illuminates pathways for others to comply with. They’ve daylighted concepts (and a waterway) that others have barely dared to ponder. Regardless of its onerous calls for, they’ve embraced the Residing Constructing Problem (LBC), which pushes architects to handle the trade’s vital contribution to the local weather disaster.

These two endearingly modest architects (in lots of cases, an oxymoron) overlap in expertise, they problem and query one another, pushing themselves and their tasks additional. Interlocking strengths help their potential to coalesce with distinction to attain cogent outcomes. To have shoppers decide to the carbon-combatting rigours of the LBC is to hold the entire room, not only a nook of it.

Working with tangata whenua, Hugh and Ewan have discovered educators, collaborators and mutually aligning kaupapa. Their first Māori shoppers might look to cornerstone tasks, resembling Bodhinyanarama Monastery, to see help for the religious facets of the human expertise. They might see an understanding of the constructing as an entity that holds wairua. In te ao Māori, Hugh and Ewan might see an emphasis on the collective and the need for values-led, sustainable design.

The cross part of Tennent Brown’s award-winning tasks — 75 from the NZIA alone — present that their design philosophies don’t privilege a choose few. From the massive finish of city to tasks that reconcile folks with the previous, from schooling to industrial, from social housing to non-public residences, designs that uplift are prolonged to all shoppers.

With a extremely thought-about sensitivity to folks and place, their structure evolves what we expect to be acquainted however is offered in ways in which encourage us to witness our personal situation. Their work has power of goal and readability of construction, it’s materially wealthy, refined, expressive and elemental. By means of LBC tasks, they’ve succeeded in bringing collectively the empirical and inventive, presenting a extra real portrayal of magnificence.

The conferring of this award is a well timed reminder of the significance of the Gold Medal. In asserting excellence as important, it holds us all to account. As we rejoice Hugh, Ewan and Tennent Brown Architects, we shine the highlight on these striving to attain the perfect for us all.

At a time the place folks in energy search division, this award acknowledges folks in service to the chance, potential and energy of partnership. As a cultural and historic document of this nation’s architectural panorama and heritage, this award honours the contribution Hugh and Ewan have made not solely to the trade however this nation.