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The International Award Architecture in Stone was created twenty four years ago when Veronafiere decided to illustrate the potential qualities of stone materials to architects, engineers, technicians and the University world by divulging excellent architectural achievements in stone from around the world. Awarding buildings that were representative and exemplary in their correct and creative use of these materials was part of a wide-ranging program of cultural undertakings enacted to promote a grand commercial event: the Marmomacc Fair, the world’s leading exhibition in the marble sector.
The first jury, formed in 1987, was composed of Mario Bellini, Kenneth Frampton, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Christian Norberg Schulz and Vincenzo Pavan and already formed an alternative structure when compared to similar events.
Up to that time, in fact, it was normal to examine and award structures that distinguished themselves primarily based on the quantities of stone materials they employed and overlooking their architectural qualities. With the Marmomacc Award a high quality jury made a choice, radical at that time, that bonded the materials with the qualities of the architecture. The jury, by means of precise critical choices, highlighted the intrinsic unity that ties together, in a construction, the formal concept with the structural logic and the materials.
The intent was to evidence the identifying role that connects stone to architecture, the potential the material has to give the entire construction a unique and distinctive character, giving substance to its overall quality and becoming what, today, has taken the name, in common language, of Architecture in Stone.
Subsequent juries have continued along these lines in the eleven editions of the Award, with participation enlarging to include international figures such as Alfonso Acocella, François Burkhardt, Marco Casamonti, Francesco Cellini, Francesco Dal Co, Luis Fernández-Galiano, Ignazio Gardella, Bernard Huet, Fulvio Irace, Juan José Lahuerta, Alessandro Mendini, Werner Oechslin, Antonio Pizza, Boris Podrecca, Gisela Podreka, Joseph Rykwert, Ignasi de Solá-Morales, Dietmar Steiner, Francesco Venezia and Mirko Zardini.
This alternation of jury members, selected from the worlds of architectural criticism, the major architectural reviews and those professions most sensitive to themes of construction technology and materials, ensured choices of works that express a plurality of methodological directions and languages and that are able to interpret and represent the many faces of today’s architecture.
In this way the Interntional Award Architecture in Stone has been able to maintain its own independent vision of the languages of contemporary times, de facto creating a privileged and critically refined observatory. Over two decades it has performed in-depth research for the best architectural products where the presence of stone materials has traced a traverse path, declining the new languages that have appeared on the international scene and, in some cases, creating unseen ones.
Architecture in Stone, as examined by the Award over the years, has been the object of radical changes, unthinkable during previous decades even though they, too, were marked by the great innovations of the Modern Movement and the lengthy follow-up of Late Modernism. The International Award Architecture in Stone has not limited itself to recording these changes but has selected the most innovative works, without bending to the instrumental and mediatic processes often adopted by magazines: the only works of archistars that have been promoted are those where stone is declined in a truly original way; room was more often given to subterranean research areas, less well known but with a wealth of new contents, shedding light on works that reveal the talent of little known or just emerging creators of contemporary architecture.
The Award has also enriched itself, over time, with a historic “ad memoriam” section selecting masterpieces by authors who disappeared in the recent past and who are, today, forgotten or marginalized, rediscovering the geniality of the language of materials and of quality in building construction.
The latest editions have also included a “vernacular architecture” award, stimulating studies of architecture “without architects”, a purgatory for easy fashions, examining their contemporary relevance from the points of view of construction logic and the intelligent and rigorous use of materials.
Specific catalogues have given an analytical reading of the works selected in the eleven editions of the Award. These catalogues, published with the contributions of international critics and historians, create a corpus illustrating seventy constructions built using a myriad of types of stone, analyzed from the viewpoint of architectural criticism, of construction systems and techniques and of the properties and characteristics of materials. Their sequence, in chronological order, gives us an eloquent vision of the evolution of contemporary Architecture in Stone.
Many of the volumes of the Award are now out of print and difficult to find. The digital project Blog Architettura di Pietra, founded by Alfonso Acocella with the collaboration of Veronafiere, will put the seventy projects (texts and images) on the Internet, taking them from the Marmomacc archives and sharing them with the readers of the Blog.
In parallel an Atlas will be put on-line, containing more than fifty works published in the volumes edited during the Marmomacc exhibitions and dedicated to the architecture in stone of several countries: Spain, Germany and Italy, representative of quality in stone design. On-line divulgation, in addition to being a communication service, also aims at contributing to the extremely necessary debate on the quality of Architecture in Stone, and on the new horizons this “discipline” unveils to us in the unceasing parade of high quality events and constructions through which contemporary stone culture manifests itself.

Vincenzo Pavan