Judges

Manuel Cervantes, Founder, Manuel Cervantes Estudio

He founded Manuel Cervantes Estudio (MCE), based in Mexico City, in 2004, and has worked on four different continents and a large variety of typologies, ranging from single-family homes and collective housing to cultural amenities and public transportation infrastructures. Focusing on the specificities of a given site, context and client rather than imposing a particular style, MCE’s architecture explores the relationship between materials, landscapes and sociocultural identities.

Cervantes is no stranger to the AR House awards. Casa Avándaro and the housing for rubber workers he designed were both highly commended, in 2020 and 2023 respectively, while his post-hurricane houses were chosen as last year’s winner. – they are certainly best placed to understand what it takes to write, submit and present an award-winning submission. Cervantes took part in AR House Live , where he presented this project and took part in a Q&A with judges Stella Daouti and Mike Tonkin. Watch about the post-hurricane houses in Acapulco here.

Catherine Ince, Curator and writer

She has held senior positions in major cultural institutions, from the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum Denmark to the Victoria & Albert Museum, Barbican Art Gallery and British Council in London. As the inaugural chief curator of V&A East between 2015 and 2022, she devised the curatorial vision for the V&A’s new two-site project in east London.

Ince is known for her critically acclaimed exhibitions and publications on major figures and movements of the 20th century, including large-scale surveys of Charles and Ray Eames and the Eames Office, the Bauhaus, as well as avant-garde Japanese fashion.

She has written for magazines, journals and books on leading figures in design history and the intersection of art, design and architecture. In 2018, Catherine was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) for her work in bringing architectural culture to non-professional audiences.

She is currently a trustee of The Cosmic House and Jencks Foundation and is the inaugural Charles and Ray Eames Foundation research fellow.

Jeannette Kuo, co-founding partner,  Karamuk Kuo and professor of architecture and construction at the Technical University of Munich.

Established in 2010 with Ünal Karamuk, Karamuk Kuo focuses on the intersection of spatial concepts with constructive technologies to approach architecture from its most fundamental sources. ‘The practice’s work is simple, undramatic, but clever to an extreme,’ wrote Jessica Bridger in the AR when Kuo was shortlisted for the Moira Gemmill Prize in 2019.

The office works on projects of a range of scales, from educational facilities to cultural projects to multifamily housing. The home they designed on a sloped terrain in Zollikon was shortlisted for the AR House awards in 2021. Recognition for this single-family house in the Zurich suburbs was ‘a great signal to the client and community that there are ways to build more densely without changing the character of the neighborhood,’ says Kuo.

After studying at UC Berkeley, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and ETH Zürich, Kuo received the Maybeck Teaching Fellowship at UC Berkeley in 2006. Since then, she has taught at MIT, EPF Lausanne, the GSD and Rice University. She has also edited two publications, A-Typical Plan in 2013 and Space of Production in 2015.