RTA Studio and Irving Smith Architects’ Scion was awarded ‘The Most Beautiful, Innovative and Iconic Building’ award at the Dubai International Best Practices Award for Sustainable Development recently in Dubai.

The Awards, which ran alongside the World Governments Summit held in Dubai this week, featured five categories and attracted almost 3000 entries from around the world. Scion was up against BIG and Heatherwick Studio’s Google Bay View in the States as the other finalist in what was the only building category and Rich Naish from RTA Studio was in Dubai to receive the award.

Judging for this category recognised “the most iconic, smart, innovative, human-centric sustainable projects that combine green design and construction practices with modern, intelligent architectural excellence in an innovative eco-human-cultural approach.”

Of the Scion award, the jury said: “This project is poised to transform the landscape with its vision to reimagining the headquarters of the prestigious Scion Research Institute, which specialises in technology development for forestry. Located on the outskirts of Redwoods in the magnificent Whakarewarewa Forest, the primary goal of this project is to bring together a workforce that was previously dispersed across various small buildings across the campus, in a central innovation hub. It also seeks to improve the Scion Institute’s public interface by building a new campus arrival point.”

“The award recognises that innovating ways to sustainably participate with the wider environment through our renewable timber resources is globally significant,” says architect Jeremy Smith of Irving Smith Architects. “It all feels rather amazing from far, far away.”

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