In June 2021, the winners of the 2020 LafargeHolcim Awards were announced; this biennial competition recognises sustainable designs from around the world. For the Europe region and in the ‘Next Generation’ category (for students and young architects), projects from Switzerland, Spain, Belgium and the United Kingdom were among the winners.

Each of the four winning projects highlights a different aspect of sustainable building. For example, architect Javier Estebala Alández from Madrid proposes creating a new public space – a dune beach – in the Andalusian port city of Cádiz by harnessing the natural forces of the sea and wind. Yufei He, an architect and research scientist at ETH Zurich, won an award for his idea to construct a building that would both house residential units and serve as a power station utilising the waste heat from Switzerland’s approximately 4,000 data centres. Shneel Malik, who completed his PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, developed a biological system to purify water using microalgae.