Overall supreme winner 2022 – Hotel Ebb
Judges comments
Our Supreme Winner this year impressed the judges in a number of ways, and not least by the range of glass applications which it employed. The Hotel Ebb presents to the street as a glass building, but one with an arresting simplicity of outline that conceals a host of complexity and delight that become apparent on closer inspection. The glazing of the façade serves as a medium for a printed artwork – something glass is eminently well-suited to be; the interior balustrades are of an unusual simplicity and transparency which gives as dramatic sense of openness to the atrium; the rooms themselves save space and transmit light through the elegant obscure glazed partitions which separate sleeping from bathing. In many ways this building is a showcase for the multiple capabilities of glass in construction, here realised through an apparently seamless sequence of good decisions in design, fabrication and installation. Everyone involved in the project should feel a real sense of achievement and this Supreme Award recognises that.
Category Winner: Designing with Glass, Commercial – Hotel Ebb
Judges comments
In this project the properties and opportunities which glass provides have been understood and exploited to the full. The façade, which is fully glazed, serves as a canvas for a glass art installation printed on it. The interiors feature a glazed atrium and glazed balustrades to stairs and landings. In the suites obscured glass partitions separate bathrooms from bedrooms. In short glass has been selected as a preferred material in as many situations as possible and in every case it has been considered and handled with great care and grace. This is, effectively, a showroom for what glass can do and formal gymnastics have been tightly supressed in a masterly exercise of control to let the material speak for itself. The designers knew the power of simple geometries and the fabricators and contractors maintained a similar level of control over their work.
Category winner: Commercial over $100k & Supreme Winner - Scion building, Rotorua
(Printed glass, supplied to another APL fabricator to install).
Judges comments:
Sometimes a box is far more than ‘just’ a box. In this case the architects have created a work that relies for its effect not on formal gymnastics, but on a rich and sure sense of heightened simplicity which is developed to achieve unquestionable drama. A strong and sophisticated timber structure is revealed by the glazed weather-skin that both protects and frames it. This transparent envelope has the quality of a jewel box, holding and at the same time revealing the interior. The colour and patterning on the front face of the building only add to its appeal.
