Following on from Patterson Associates strong showing at the World Architecture Festival, currently being held in Singapore, Auckland-based firm RTA Studio has picked up a gong for it’s C3 House. The house, designed for a site in Wanaka, has won the ‘Future Projects - Houses’ category. In describing RTA’s project, the jury said it was impressed wih its highly considered approach to energy use, both in terms of fuel requirements and of the embodied energy used in materials.  

“As a prototype for a carbon-neutral house, it acts as a paradigm that can be emulated in future developments on the site. In formal terms it has a topographic presence that responds to the surrounding landscape, but what clearly sets it apart is its thoughtful propositional nature, making it a ‘house of the future’.”

RTA Studio is no stranger to WAF success. In 2009 it was highly commended for Ironbank, the Samson Corporation-owned, mixed-use development on K Road, Auckland, and it has also been shortlisted on two other occassions: in 2011 for its House for a Family of Five and in 2010 for its AUT Lecture Theatres and Conference Centre.

Architect Richard Naish, who presented the project, says the next step is to present the project to the “super jury” for world future project of the year.

In a message from Singapore, Naish also reported that the category for completed house projects in the ‘villa category’ was “hotly contested, with strong New Zealand presentations from Fearon Hay and Crosson Clarke Carnachan”. That category, however, was eventually won by Australian firm John Wardle Architects.

Wardle’s project, a house on the site of an old shearing shed in North Bruny Island, Australia, “distinguished itself from three other projects we felt almost worthy of an award because of its deeper evolution from research into the history and specificity of the site and region,” said the judges.

“The research resulted in a deceptively simple spatial and three-dimensional external outcome in which we could detect many layers of meaning.  It also resulted in the use of unusual materials derived from the property’s former use.” In the villa category, the judges highly commended Geneses House in Brazil by Isay Weinfeld and Waterberg Observatory in South Africa by Silvio Rech and Lesley Carstens.

John Wardle Architects’ project was also named 2012 Australian House of the Year in the annual Houses Awards programme, presented by Houses magazine in Australia. More images of the project can be viewed here.