Obel Award

The OBEL AWARD is a global award presented annually to honour "recent and outstanding architectural contributions to human development all over the world."

The prize sum is €100,000, making the OBEL AWARD one of the world's largest architecture prizes in terms of prize money. From the Awards establishment in 2019 until 2023 the winner also received an artwork trophy designed by Tomás Saraceno.

The OBEL AWARD was founded by Danish businessman Henrik Frode Obel (1942-2014) and sponsored by Henrik F. Obel Foundation, based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Henrik Frode Obel decided to dedicate his entire fortune to establishing a foundation to reward and support exceptional works of architecture – and so to contribute in his own way to the development of the fields of architecture and design.

The award aims to honour outstanding architectural contributions to social and ecological development globally. These contributions should offer seminal approaches to urgent problems.

The award focuses on the collaborative and cross-disciplinary elements of architecture that demonstrates influential ideas and solutions that can spearhead and seed future architectural developments.

The OBEL AWARD seeks to recognise talent, creativity, and responsibility and offers an incentive to architects and other professionals to consider their obligations toward the common good.

Besides the annual award ceremony, The OBEL AWARD produces books and publications and presents exhibitions and lectures on themes within architecture. They also do Teaching Fellowships and awards internationalisation funds and travel grants to Danish students of architecture.

2019: WELL BEING
Winner: Water garden by Jun'ya Ishigami

The winning project of 2019 is an outdoor extension of the existing Art Biotop Nasu, a resort that offers courses in pottery, glass making, and other artistic activities at the foot of Mount Nasu in Tochigi, a prefecture north of Tokyo.

Earlier, the site was a paddy field; earlier still, a forest overgrown with moss. Traces of the site’s history remains, such as a sluice gate to draw water.

The site of the new hotel was a forest, where many trees would be cut down due to construction. Because the total area of the forest site and that of the meadow site were nearly the same, Junya Ishigami proposed to relocate the entire forest to the adjacent meadow. Through this act, the meadow site is transformed not only by moving the forest, but also by superimposing all the layers from past environments in the site’s history: the landscape of the paddy field and the landscape of the mossy forest are overlapped as one. Trees from the adjacent forest are rearranged on the site, and water is drawn in from the existing sluice gate to fill countless ponds, all connected to the existing irrigation system with water flowing continuously at different rates. The ponds and trees spread across the entire site at a close density never found within nature, with moss laid out beautifully to fill the spaces in between.

With this new mossy forest of innumerable trees and limitless ponds, a new nature never before seen appears on the site.

2020: MENDING
Winner: Anandaloy by Anna Heringer

The winning project of 2020 is an unconventional, multifunctional building that hosts a therapy centre for people with disabilities on the ground floor and a textile studio on the top floor producing fair fashion and art.

The building is called Anandaloy, which means The Place of Deep Joy in the local dialect of Bangla/Bengali. Surrounded by lush green paddy fields in northern Bangladesh stands a curving building in two storeys built out of mud and bamboo. The mud walls curve and dance, and a big ramp winds up to the first floor. Below the ramp are caves that provide either a fun place to move around or a quiet space if you a need for a moment to feel protected and embraced.

2021: CITIES
Winner: The 15-minute city by Carlos Moreno

The idea behind the 15-minute city is that cities should be (re)designed, so that all residents are able to access their daily needs (housing, work, food, health, education, and culture and leisure) within the distance of a 15-minute walk or bike ride. The model has been adopted by several cities around the world, most notably in Paris where mayor Anne Hidalgo collaborated with Carlos Moreno and made it part of her re-election campaign in 2020. In 2020, C40 Cities promoted the 15-minute city idea as a blueprint for post-COVID-19 recovery.

2022: EMISSIONS
Winner: Seratech by Sam Draper and Barney Shanks

The 2022 winning project is a technology developed by PhD students at Imperial College London, Sam Draper and Barney Shanks, who have found a way to produce carbon-neutral concrete. The team, which consists of material scientists and engineers, has developed an efficient, low-cost process to capture CO2 emissions directly from industrial flues. The process captures and stores all the CO2 through a chemical process, which also yields a cement additive – a silica – that can replace the amount of Portland cement in the concrete mix by up to 40%. The carbon capture associated with producing the silica means the concrete products can be zero carbon.

The raw materials used in Seratech’s process – waste CO2 and a magnesium silicate mineral – are naturally abundant all over the globe. Furthermore, the process integrates into existing manufacturing lines and the equipment used in concrete production. As such, it is possible to implement in every cement plant around the world and does not require major shifts in current practices or mindsets.

Given the huge carbon footprint of the construction industry, Seratech’s process has the potential to significantly reduce embodied emissions globally and to support future low-carbon construction.

Seratech is currently developing the design of a pilot plant to model the process at large scale.

2023: ADAPTION
Winner: Living breakwaters by Kate Orff SCAPE

Living Breakwaters, the 2023 OBEL AWARD winning project, is a half mile linear necklace of near-shore breakwaters along the south shore of Staten Island in New York. A mix of stones and carefully designed ecologically enhanced concrete units are placed strategically to calm the water, reduce erosion, and rebuild onshore beaches, but also to support oysters, fin fish, and other marine species. The oysters will form part of the design of the artificial reef formation. As they reproduce, the breakwaters grow denser and able to provide more protection of the shore.

Beyond the breakwaters, the project has involved nearly a decade of educational and engagement-related programming designed to advance community stewardship, citizen science, and recreation along the water’s edge.

The Living Breakwaters concept was developed by a large, multi-disciplinary team led by SCAPE as part of a winning proposal for Rebuild By Design, the design competition launched by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development(HUD) after Superstorm Sandy.

Jury members 2023

 * Martha Schwartz, chair. Landscape architect, urbanist, and artist, USA.


 * Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, juror. Architect, co-founder and design principal of Snöhetta Architects, Norway.


 * Louis Becker, juror and board member. Architect and design principal of Henning Larsen Architects, Denmark.


 * Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, juror. Professor (em.) and philosopher. Germany.


 * Xu Tiantian, juror. Architect, founding principal, DnA, Beijing, China.


 * Aric Chen, juror. Design curator and Artistic Director of Rotterdam's Het Nieuwe Instituut, based in Shanghai, China.


 * Sumayya Vally, juror. Architect, founder and director of Counterspace, Johannesburg, South Africa and London, UK.

Teaching fellowships
The aim of the OBEL AWARD Teaching Fellowships is to bring the professional and academic realms closer together by enhancing the debate and learnings of the award theme chosen within that year.

The Fellowship will support the teaching of a new course or courses within an official program at an accredited academic institution. Illustrating the goal of bringing new voices into academia, thus showing dedication to and support of the objectives of the OBEL AWARD.

In 2023 OBEL AWARD received applications from 19 different countries. The winners of the first cycle will teach at two universities in Africa. The International University of East Africa in Uganda and Yaba College of Technology in Nigeria. There is one at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Latin America, and one teaching fellowship at College of Science and Technology (Bhutan).