The winners of the Structural Awards 2024 were announced in London recently. Xizang Art Museum won the 2024 Supreme Award for Structural Engineering Excellence, the highest honor of the year. This is the first key project to win this award in the Xizang Autonomous Region.

The Structural Awards have been sponsored by the Institution of Structural Engineers since 1968. Its purpose is to grant honors to the excellent structural design of infrastructure and building projects with new ideas, a sense of beauty, sustainability, and high value. It is called the “Oscar” in the circle of structural engineering. The projects winning this award in history include the Sydney Opera House and other landmark buildings.

The Xizang Art Museum is located in Chengguan District, Lhasa. Its total land area is about 47,000 square meters and the total building area is about 32,000 square meters. Designed by Tongji Architectural Design Co., Ltd., its design concept is “the key to the Himalaya”, which symbolizes that it will become an important window showing the culture of Xizang and the Himalaya. The design team kept the original buildings of the old cement plant to the greatest extent and reasonably planned to meet the complicated functional requirements of a large art museum. It also incorporated the regional cultural features of Xizang and fully displayed the old memory of industrial development here in the district.

The judges of the Structural Awards highly praised the Xizang Art Museum as “this project brilliantly reuses a utilitarian cement factory, artfully transforming the storage rooms, kilns, and slurry tanks into new museum spaces. By retaining much of the original structure, it minimises the consumption of new materials and showcases how we can learn to love old buildings in new ways. The project sets an international standard for reuse and seismic strengthening under challenging local conditions. It revitalises an industrial site with thoughtful new build elements, demonstrating bold engineering and low carbon construction. Not just retention but true transformation.”