GROHE Water Prize

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The GROHE Water Prize awards visionary projects that are pushing the boundaries of design within the built environment and water. GROHE will award £10,000 to the winning project to help enhance the scheme.

About the prize

The GROHE Water Prize will open for entries in February 2024 and is free to enter. The prize winner will receive a £10,000 award from GROHE to enhance the project, and there will be a panel discussion on the Festival Hall Stage during WAF. The overall winner will be revealed ahead of the festival in November and they will receive their trophy at the Gala Dinner on the final day of WAF.

See the GROHE Water Prize 2023 winner and shortlist below. Watch this space for 2024 entries to open!

2023 Winner

Netherlands practice UArchitects has won this year’s GROHE Water Prize with a proposal for ‘microcolonies’ of floating platforms in Bangladesh, intended to cope with extreme weather events, combat poverty and provide a new model of how communities can address the challenges of climate change.

The annual prize, launched six years ago in conjunction with World Architecture Festival (WAF), will be presented at this year’s Festival in Singapore (29 November to 1 December).

Misak Terzibasiyan from UArchitects describes the proposal as a scaling up of a basic ‘microhome’ unit, to allow for the growing of food and even raising of livestock on connected platforms, with a community hub created to provide services (such as education and storage) to clusters of family homes. He notes that clean water production is also of great importance for this micro-colony, necessitating additional in-depth research to find the best technical and cost-effective solution for providing water for consumption.

A development plan and construction sequencing form part of the proposal, which envisages the £10,000 prize money being used in conjunction with the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) and the Government of Bangladesh. There will also be close coordination with the Foreign Affairs department of the Netherlands, the Dutch embassy in Dhaka, and the architecture department of the Technical University, Eindhoven.

‘This pilot project can be a milestone in adapting to climate change through self-sustaining floating communities’, says the architect.

The judges (see list below) admired the proposal for its social and economic ambition as well as its design proposition – simultaneously fighting poverty and climate change in a country where extreme weather events can impoverish communities overnight. They also liked the attitude of the project to water, regarding it as something to be embraced and used, rather than resisted and feared.

Other proposals shortlisted in this year’s awards included a programme of revitalisation in Antiquoia, Columbia; and a University of Stuttgart project to cool building interiors and facades through use of water-absorbing materials.

GROHE is part of LIXIL, the Tokyo-based company specialising in water technology, housing products and building technology.

This year’s judges were: Antoine Besseyre des Horts and Patrick Speck, LIXIL design leaders respectively for the Asia Pacific and Europe/Middle East/North Africa regions; Jeremy Melvin, WAF Curator; and Paul Finch, WAF Programme Director.

GROHE Water Prize 2023