New Bocconi in European Final

After the success in Barcelona last October, when it picked up the prestigious World Building of the Year award at the World Architecture Festival, the new Bocconi University building has been chosen as one of the five finalists for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2009 which will be awarded in May.

The Prize is a joint initiative of the European Commission and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe and is awarded every two years to works that have contributed to the construction of the European city. The other finalists are the Multimodal Centre in Nice, Zenith Music Hall in Strasbourg, Norwegian Opera in Oslo and Sant Antoni's District Library in Barcelona.

The new faculty building of Bocconi University in Milan, designed by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Dublin-based Grafton Architects, was officially opened last October. Assigned to Grafton Architects at the beginning of 2002, after an international competition, the new building was concluded in 2008 and cost 100 million euros.