The Concrete Design Competition is a biennial ideas and design competition organised and funded by a consortium of European cement and concrete federations. Febelcem is the driving force behind the competition in Belgium. It is open to students enrolled in architecture courses in one of the participating countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Ireland. The first edition took place in 2004, so the prize was awarded for the tenth time in 2022.

Concrete remains the world’s most widely used building material. Current global challenges are forcing us to rethink our use of space, raw materials and energy consumption. The cement industry, too, is calling for a fresh perspective on concrete and for the material’s specific properties to be harnessed to meet the demand for more ecological and energy-efficient construction. The brief for the Concrete Design Competition was: can you, by looking at it from a different perspective, creatively reinterpret the existing positive properties of concrete, so that the material can make a significant difference in terms of raw material consumption, reuse, energy efficiency, comfort and performance?