The Ap headquarters is just the latest project, in chronological order, to be awarded, in 2022, by the Grand Prix, the competition conceived and supported by Casalgrande Padana to shine a spotlight on the architecture that best enhances the now universal design abacus that is porcelain stoneware, which has gradually become, thanks to companies like the Emilian one founded in 1960, a real skin, an integral part and lever of the compositional process at the base of the work, and no longer a simple interchangeable covering, to be added later.

The twelve editions of the event, and the list of winners, represent a repertoire of excellence spread throughout the world, as well as a further catalogue of possibilities – collected at the end of each edition of the award in a Creative Book created in collaboration with Casabella – that each author, architect or interior designer can enhance in their own way.

For example: 2022, the year of the victory of TPG Architecture – in the Shopping and business centres section – is the same year that sees another project of great value come in second place, in the same category, such as the Experimenta Science Centre in Heilbronn, Germany, designed by Sauerbruch Hutton, and, in third place, the Angelini Farmaceutica headquarters in Rome, by Studio Transit and Enzo Pinci.

In the German case, the floor tiles are cut into a pentagon to generate a variable pattern that recalls the refined dynamism of an interactive science dissemination center.

In the Roman project, the installation with the trencadís technique – which focuses on uneven pieces and varies the size of the joints – creates a special rhythm of oblique lines, irregular angles and surfaces that are not perpendicular to each other that the architects wanted to highlight.

Then there are, among the winners in the other categories (Public Building, Residential and Facade Cladding), some of the most interesting architecture at any level of the recent past: the swimming pool covered in earth-colored ceramic by Augusto Ortoleva, Giuseppe Motta and Studio Cantone-Ortoleva, a reinterpretation of the landscape lesson of Luis Barragán immersed in the historic center of Catania; the tourist complex in La Ciotat in France by Alfonso Femia, a manifesto of the “right to matter” for the rediscovery of a tactile, visual and symbolic design.

Again, the redevelopment of the Szent Gellèrt school in Budapest entrusted to Csilla Kutlik, Árkád-Terv, where the pattern of the floor is an invitation to grasp the beauty in the place that symbolizes education and growth.

Given the quality of the winners, who have nothing to envy the eighteen hundred designers who have applied to the competition since 1990, it is to be expected that the new edition of the Gran Prix – the call expires on December 31 – will become a point of reference for the future work of architects and designers.

What makes the contest a special observatory on the evolution of ceramics is, after all, precisely the ability to intercept the innovations of stoneware from any point of view, from the functional and applicative to the aesthetic.

In particular, as the president of Casalgrande Padana, Franco Manfredini, explains, “the jury must highlight the elements of enhancement and correct use of ceramic material at different levels in each work”: in terms of creativity, in relation to the architectural composition, design, study of colours and finishes, installation design, customisation of the project; in terms of functionality and technical performance, in relation to the intended use and type of intervention; in terms of installation, in relation to correct execution, application technique, study of details.