The Gabriel García Márquez library in Barcelona, ??chosen last August in Rotterdam as the best in the world by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, won the 2023 FAD Architecture Prize this Thursday. This work, signed by Guillermo Sevillano and Elena Orte , members of the Madrid studio SUMA, shared the award ex aequo with the Reggio School, built in Encinar de los Reyes by Andrés Jaque, also from Madrid, at the head of its Office for Political Innovation.

It had been a decade since the FAD for Architecture had been shared. In 2013 it was for two disparate buildings (one by Toni Gironès, with an archaeological function, and another school building, by the Portuguese Pedro Domingues). This year it was for a library and a school, which the jury considered “excellent works, of a complementary nature, representatives of a broad-spectrum contemporary architecture.”

This argument suggests both coincidences and divergences in the criteria of the winners. That’s how it is. The two works express their concern for environmental problems. But they do it in a different way. The García Márquez Library, in the Sant Martí district, is built using a structure of wooden panels, hybridized with steel, and achieves loose spaces flooded with overhead and lateral light, ideal for reading, while its volume adapts , without losing character, to the chamfer on which it stands.

The Reggio School, for its part, also expresses environmental concern, for example, in the cork insulation on the façade or in its interior garden on the fourth floor, under a greenhouse roof. It also includes powerful proposals, such as those of the large agora on the rear façade, or the adjoining loggia, and others of a different nature, such as the main façade, with a capricious formal resolution.

The FAD Interior Design Award went to Barcelona-based Jorge Vidal Estudio and Marcos Catalán Estudio, for their renovation of the Garciaz farmhouse in Cáceres, carried out with sensitivity and appreciation for local materials and techniques.

The FAD for City and Landscape was awarded to the conditioning of the port shore in Porto do Con (Coruña), signed by architects Juan Creus and Covadonga Carrasco, together with Marcial Rodríguez, Alberto Redondo and José Valladares. The FAD for Ephemeral Interventions went to the Twist project, in Madrid, of circus and rock inspiration, created by Javier Jiménez (Studio Animal).

The jury of this 65th edition of the FAD for Architecture and Urbanism, which was awarded last night at the Industrial School, was chaired by the interior designer and designer Francesc Rifé, and included members Xavier Delgado, Carme Fiol, Uriel Fogué , Patrícia Santos and Jelena Prokopljevic.

The International FAD, for works by Spanish authors abroad, was also shared, in this case by Susan’s House, a work in the USA by Xavier Vendrell and Mary English, and The Dark Line, in Taiwan, by Miquel Batlle and Michele Orliac. The FAD for Thought and Criticism was shared by Arquitectura do Bacalhau e otheras espécies, by André Tavares and Diego Inglez de Souza, and España fea, by Andrés Rubio.

Finally, the new Re-FAD award, created to distinguish works in the field of rehabilitation, reuse and regeneration, was for the renaturalization of Rec Comtal, in the Barcelona neighborhood of Vallbona, the work of Carles Enrich’s studio.