Grand Prix for the Jacques Rougerie Foundation-INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION IN ARCHITECTURE 2022

The proposal by our Osaka Main Office’s Design Department won the Grand Prix in the Jacques Rougerie Foundation-INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION IN ARCHITECTURE 2022.
The competition is an international environmental architecture design competition sponsored annually by the Jacques Rougerie Foundation, which was founded by French architect Jacques Rougerie. It is an open competition in three categories: Space Architecture, Sea Architecture, and Sea Level Rise Architecture. This year marked the 12th competition. Dominique Perrault, designer of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, served as a member of the jury and selected our proposal, CLOUD PURIFIANT (PURIFYING CLOUD), in the Sea Level Rise category from among approximately 1,000 proposals. PURIFYING CLOUD was selected as the Grand Prix winner.

It is said that in the year 2100, approximately 90 percent of Japan's sandy beaches will disappear due to sea level rise. In order to address various problems that this will cause, we proposed PURIFYING CLOUD, a building that generates fresh water by condensation using the power of nature. The generated water is used for human living, and it is further filtered and permeated into the land, and then stored in aquifers to mitigate the loss of farmland due to salt damage. The proposal, which focuses on the natural phenomenon of condensation and incorporates a mechanism applicable to coastal areas around the world into architecture, was highly acclaimed for its ability to connect the sphere of human living to the future.