Museum report·New York
MoMA Gives Its First $200,000 Ambasz Prize to the Architect of a Flood-Plain Community Centre
Bangladeshi architect Kashef Chowdhury of URBANA has won the inaugural Ambasz-MoMA Annual Prize for Nature-Reconciled Architecture for the Friendship Centre in Gaibandha, with $100,000 going to his practice and $100,000 to plant trees in Argentina's Gran Chaco forest.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has named the Bangladeshi architect Kashef Chowdhury as the first winner of its Ambasz-MoMA Prize, a new annual award worth $200,000 for a single project judged to reconcile architecture with nature. Chowdhury's practice, URBANA, wins for the Friendship Centre in Gaibandha, Bangladesh, a training facility and meeting space for underserved communities in the flood-prone Jamuna River delta.
The award is split in two: Chowdhury receives a $100,000 cash purse, and a further $100,000 goes to the Fundación Gran Chaco in Argentina, which will fund reforestation in the Gran Chaco forest in honour of Friendship, the non-governmental organisation that commissioned the centre. MoMA describes the prize as the largest award for a single project in architecture; the cash component equals the Pritzker Architecture Prize, and the full sum matches the Driehaus Prize.
The Friendship Centre was designed between 2008 and 2010 and completed in 2011. Because the delta soil cannot bear heavy loads, the building sits on a compacted earthen embankment that protects it from flooding, and was built by hand almost entirely from clay bricks made locally. Its form draws on the ruins of a monastery at nearby Mahasthangarh, the country's earliest known archaeological site, dating to at least the third century BCE. Chowdhury has said the building has served its community for 14 years, yet draws on 2,300 years of flood-protection history. The centre, which won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in the 2014-16 cycle, contains offices, classrooms, a library, meditation spaces, dormitories and dining facilities, with green roofs, courtyards and rainwater pools moderating the heat.
The prize is named for Emilio Ambasz, the Argentinian-American architect who was a MoMA curator from 1968 to 1976 and has given the museum more than $20 million. It is run by the Emilio Ambasz Institute, founded in 2020. The winner was chosen from nearly 140 projects, nominated by 30 international experts. The jury included the institute's director Evangelos Kotsioris, chief curator Martino Stierli, and the architects Shelley McNamara and Wang Shu.
