Juries
The board and the jury have followed such a growth in fame and today past participants form a community which is close to the initiative and supports it with various contribution and inspires new ideas in the field of sustainable architecture. Thomas Herzog, Glenn Murcutt, Erik Bystrup, Peter Rich, Li Xiaodong, Francisco Mangado, Francine Houben, Françoise Hélène Jourda, Sir Michael Hopkins, Juhani Pallasmaa, Alexandros Tombazis, Wilfried Wang, Hermann Kaufmann, Matteo Thun, Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, Brian Ford, Mario Cucinella are just few names of the afore-mentioned supporters.
The strength of the initiative also lies in the board's full independence from the official sponsor, which has always maintained a neutral attitude focusing on decision's objectivity.
The sponsor's one and only requirement is to award the prize to those international high quality initiatives in architecture taking into consideration projects' location, aims and materials' sustainability.
Board's members are different every year in order to make sure that decisions are neutral and to avoid any influence or interference with specific styles or trends, so that awarded solutions can not be based on any bias regarding the types of projects, their destinations, the materials or the structural engineering systems.
The board is composed by professionals with very different cultural backgrounds, they come from diverse places and from different climatic areas to grant the widest range of views and experiences and to promote an informed and balanced evaluation of the projects.
The number of very different contributions that in the past few years came from every part of the world proves an important fact: the solutions and the submitted projects reflect new goals, an individual approach that mirrors the local realities, an approach which is far from the 'international style' in its expressions.
Local initiatives, permanently tied to the geographic, topographic, environmental and climatic context can show new approaches to manage energy in terms of natural light, overheating protection, environmental energy exploitation to produce electricity for heating and cooling. All these aspects reflect a new architectonic regionalism driven by solutions developed in different areas and mediated by the authors' creative capacity, designing skills and knowledge.
