Neyran Turan’s hempcrete project wins AN 2024 Best of Design Award
Hempo Longhouse, Associate Professor Neyran Turan’s research and design project on hempcrete construction, has been awarded first prize in the Unbuilt-Residential Single-Unit category of The Architect’s Newspaper‘s 2024 Best of Design Awards. The project was made possible by funding from a 2023 CED Lau Grant for Just Climate Futures.
Hempo Longhouse is a project on regenerative and low-carbon architectural construction. Through the design of a longhouse in California built with the plant-based construction material hempcrete, the project imagines new construction protocols, supply chains, and agroecological stewardship around hempcrete construction and restages a practice that is situated within the infrastructures of just energy transitions, decarbonized climate futures, and non-extractive frameworks.
The project is conceptualized as a longhouse, which alludes to a building typology that defies norms of private ownership and suggests alternative land ownership and communal living formats. Through the design of an 8′ X 4′ prefabricated hempcrete panel assembly system, the project experiments with the material’s casting capacities, resulting in various construction protocols, insulation and thermal mass properties, and aesthetic effects.
“I appreciate the thorough documentation of this project, from plan drawing to models and material mockups. This isn’t just paper architecture, it’s ready to make much-needed change in real world housing discourse,” noted juror Emily Conklin, managing editor of The Architect’s Newspaper.
The Architect’s Newspaper‘s Best of Design Awards, a highly competitive project-based award program, is one of North America’s most prestigious design awards. The program showcases outstanding built and unbuilt design projects of the year based on several criteria: strength of the presentation, evidence of innovation, creative use of new technology, sustainability, and good design.
Turan’s practice NEMESTUDIO has been widely recognized. Among its honors are seven previous Best of Design Awards from The Architect’s Newspaper and a 2024 Design Vanguard Award from Architectural Record. The work of the practice has been exhibited internationally at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, La Casa Encendida in Madrid, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, among other venues. Turan is the author of the 2020 book Architecture as Measure and curator of the Pavilion of Turkey in the 2021 Venice Biennale 17th International Architecture Exhibition.
