RP bags 2 Holcim awards in Beijing

BEIJING — The Philippines won two of nine awards in the first Holcim Awards for Sustainable Construction for the Asia-Pacific region given at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse here Thursday night.

The team of Roland Rodriguez, Lemuel Alfeche and Oscar Cinco won the silver award for their project "Concrete Substrates for Accelerated Coral Restoration," an inexpensive but effective method of renewing coral growth in devastated marine areas. Prototypes of the multi-legged structures, which were hailed by the international jury of academicians and experts as an "intelligent" use of a simple and inexpensive idea, are currently being tested on site in Medina, Misamis Oriental.

This automatically qualifies them for the Holcim Awards global competition to be held in April 2006 in Bangkok, Thailand together with the gold prize winner of a clan resettlement project in Hangzhou, China and the bronze prize of an air suit for an old residential building in Hiroshima, Japan, and twelve other regional winners from Europe and the Americas.

In addition, the team of civil engineer Artessa Saldivar-Sali and architecture student Aaron Lecciones won one of three encouragement awards for their plan for an Ivatan Agricultural Campus in Itbayat, Batanes that will meet residents’ requirements for training in agricultural methods as well as develop eco-tourism potentials in the island with energy-efficient structures. The project was particularly cited for "high social equity… directly involving local stakeholders" in the conceptualization of the planned campus. Both in their early 20s, they were the youngest awardees in the regional competition.

A total of 1508 entries from 12 countries in the region participated in the competition. Total world entries numbered 3,000. China still won the majority of prizes with five, while Japan and India had one each.

The Holcim Awards for Sustainable Construction is sponsored by the Holcim Foundation of Switzerland. Holcim Ltd. is one of the largest cement manufacturers in the world and at the forefront of environmental and social responsibility efforts. It has five cement plants in the Philippines.