The winner of the 2015 Mies van der Rohe Award has been announced as Barozzi / Veiga’s extraordinary, glowing concert venue, the Philharmonic Hall in Szczecin, Poland.

The building scooped the €60,000 Prize for Contemporary Architecture from a shortlist of five projects, taking the award, which is given every two years in recognition of outstanding European architecture.

Although Barcelona-based Fabrizio Barozzi and Alberto Veiga were inspired by the neo-Gothic spires of the city, the hall’s translucent glass facade is a minimalist counterpoint to its surroundings and glows white among the surrounding dark stone buildings.

Outside, the sheer walls of the concert hall stretch up to numerous steeply pitched roofs, giving a spiky profile. Colour changers shift the light in bands which glow alternately in a colour sequence.

Inside, the Philharmonic Hall houses two auditoriums, conceived as suspended boxes, with an ample bright lobby between them lit by large skylights. The interiors are lined with angular metallic panels, giving a golden glow and contrasting with the white walls of the lobby.

The Philharmonic Hall has already picked up the Life in Architecture award 2013-2014 for best building in Poland from Polish architecture magazine, Architektura Murator.

Three of the other four finalists – the Ravensburg Art Museum by Lederer Ragnarsdóttir Oei’s, the Danish Maritime Museum by Bjarke Ingels Group and the Antinori Winery by Archea Associati – were also leisure projects.

The Mies van der Rohe Award has been granted biannually since 1987 by a group made up of the European Commission, the European parliament and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe.

Named after the eponymous American-German architect, one of the pioneers of modern architecture, the award is among the most prestigious of its kind in Europe. Winners are selected from projects completed by European architects in the preceding two years.

Previous winners have included the Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre in Reykjavik, Iceland, by Henning Larsen Architects and artist Olafur Eliasson and the Neues Museum in Berlin, Germany by David Chipperfield Architects and Julian Harrap.

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