Society often underestimates what good, smart architecture can do. It can contribute to solving the complex problems of today's world and respond to the rapidly and radically changing needs of people, emerging issues and various societal phenomena. These are some of the reflections made by the members of the EUmies Awards 2024 jury on the role of contemporary architecture.

The EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture—Mies van der Rohe Award is a biannual architecture prize awarded by the European Commission and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe in Barcelona. For the 18th edition, 362 works located in 38 countries were nominated, from which, after an intense journey through Europe and many hours of discussion, the jury members Frédéric Druot, Martin Braathen, Sala Makumbundu, Adriana Krnáčová, Hrvoje Njirić, Tinatin Gurgenidze and Pippo Ciorra selected 40 works for display in the exhibition.

Among them, there were the following finalists and winners: a study pavilion as a dismantlable system that challenges the constraints and imagery of sustainability in Braunschweig; an urban library that transforms a neighbourhood by opening up as a new exterior and interior public space in Barcelona; a vertical school on the outskirts of Madrid that emerges as the result of idiosyncratic imagery, spatial richness, and a reparative ecological aim; a mystical garden on the outskirts of Lund that strives to preserve a small natural area around which a residential neighbourhood will rise very soon; an art gallery that transforms a derelict slaughterhouse in Ostrava opening it to everybody; a landscape intervention in a convent in Santa Lucia di Tallano in Corsica that brings together people through culture, and a silent intervention in the small Portuguese village of Piódão.

You can imagine the exhibition like a forest that was made up of the best contemporary architectural works of Europe. Their story was told in many layers through photographs, drawings, models, texts and videos. All 362 nominees were also described in detail in the competition catalogue that accompanied and complemented the exhibition.