ÁBATON selected for ’50 Under 50: Innovators of the 21st Century’ (2015)

ÁBATON features in '50 Under 50: Innovators of the 21st Century' (2015), an international selection of practices made by a jury of five architects.

In 2015 the Australian publisher Images Publishing released ’50 Under 50: Innovators of the 21st Century’, a book edited by Beverly Russell, Eva L. Maddox and Farooq Ameen that searched the world for fifty architecture and design practices led by professionals aged fifty or under. The final selection was made by a jury of five architects: Stanley Tigerman, Ralph Johnson, Jeanne Gang, Marion Weiss and Qingyun Ma.

ÁBATON is among the fifty, alongside practices such as MAD, SO-IL, Kéré Architecture and Tatiana Bilbao.

The inclusion came when the studio was seventeen years old. By then it had built off-grid country houses, award-winning housing developments in Madrid and a twenty-seven-square-metre portable home, and it had sustained the same idea across very different scales: that architecture should be simple, efficient and humane, and relate to its place rather than to fashion.

The book is not an award but an editorial selection made by a jury, and that is how it should be read: as the portrait of a generation of practices that, in places very far apart, were changing the way of designing. That ÁBATON is part of that portrait says more about its trajectory than any trophy.

Source: SCI-Arc (2015) on the composition of the jury; library catalogue of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.