Four Finalists for MCHAP Emerging Architecture award to present at Crown Hall Tuesday, winner to be announced that evening

UPDATE [5/22/14]  Pezo Von Ellrichshausen has won the inaugural MCHAP for Emerging Architecture,  for Casa Poli on Chile's Coliumo peninsula.

A benefit dinner this Tuesday, May 20th, will see the announcement of the inaugural winner of the new Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Architecture “awarded to an outstanding built work in the Americas by an emerging practice completed within the preceding two years.”  The prize comes with $25,000 cash and an IIT professorship for the coming year.

The 47 submissions, which included Jeanne Gang's Aqua, have been whittled down to four finalists.  This Tuesday afternoon from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., each of those finalists will be in Crown Hall presenting their projects, followed by Vedram Mimica leading a round-table debate with the architects plus Phyllis Lambert, Sarah Whiting, Wiel Arets, Dirk Denison, MCHAP Nominators Robert McCarter, Franco Micucci, Susan Conger-Austin, Marshall Brown, Sean Keller, and the audience.

The four finalists include . . .

photograph: Cristobal Palma - click images for larger view

The Kiltro House in Talca, Pencahue, Chile, by Juan Pablo Corvalan/Susuka/Supersudaca

photgraph: Oliver Hess

Maximilian’s Schell in Los Angeles by Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues

photograph: James Brittain

 OMS Stage in Winnipeg, Manitoba, by 5468796 Architecture

photograph: Cristobal Palma

and Poli House in Tome, Bio-Bio Region, Chile, by Pezo von Ellrichshausen.

The Emerging Architecture award is the warm-up for the main event, the MCHAP Award, for which there is 225 nominees (pictured here) of “built works, completed between January 2000 and December 2013 . . . within the North and South American continents.”

Mansueto Library

The list is a who's-who usual suspects of big profile projects, again including Jeanne Gang's Aqua, as well as Gang's WMS Boathouse at Clark Park,  Helmut Jahn's Mansueto Library, Rem Koolhaas's IIT McCormick Tribune Campus Center, Renzo Piano's Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, Zoka Zola's Pfanner House, John Ronan's Poetry Foundation and Gary Comer Youth Center, Perkins+will's Rush University Medical Tower, David Hovey's Sterling Ridge, and - in an act of supreme irony - Tod Williams/Billie Tsien Architects' 2001 American Folk Art Museum, which the Museum of Modern Art is currently in the process of demolishing.

Rush University Medical Tower

The MCHAP Award “will laud those built works that recognize the altered circumstances of the human condition. It will honor those projects that consider how we might elevate the quality of our built environments by extending our interests beyond the proverbial four walls. It will endorse those who acknowledge the interdisciplinary nature of our new ventures. Above all, it will recognize those who have invested their work with the mystery and power of human imagination. The objective is to reward the daring contemplation of the intersection of the new metropolis and human ecology.”

The Americas Prize comes with a $50,000 cash award, a year as MCHAP Chair at the IIT School of Architecture, and a perpetually re-stocked bowl of blue-only M&M's.  The winner  is scheduled to be announced this fall.