Contemporary European Architecture ATLAS: European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture Mies van der Rohe Award 1988-2015, edited by Celia Marín Vega, Marina Romero
Fundació Mies van der Rohe, 2016
Hardcover, 864 pages

[All photos © Adrian Pedrazas, courtesy of Fundació Mies van der Rohe]

In the course of the EU Mies Award's 27-year history ? from 1988 to 2015 ? 2,881 projects have been nominated from 38 countries. Juries of the biennial award have selected fourteen prize winners since its impetus shortly after Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion was reconstructed in 1986, as well as selecting eight emerging architect prize winners since 2001. Catalogs have accompanied each of the fourteen cycles, highlighting the winner, the finalists, and shortlisted works, but nothing to date has attempted to tackle the whole archive ? all 2,881 projects. Perhaps spurred by the 2013 book and 2014 exhibition that celebrated the EU Mies Award's 25th anniversary, the Fundació Mies van der Rohe has published Contemporary European Architecture ATLAS. The huge volume presents all of the projects, but it does it in a way that attempts to make sense of the geographies, typologies, and chronology of the prize.
[The 864-page book's colorful fore edge]

The task of organizing the thousands of projects into a coherent presentation (done by graphic designer Núria Saban Prat) is hinted at by the cover and the book's fore edge; the former is a rainbow of colors overlapping each ...