The Second Monaco Smart & Sustainable Marina Rendezvous, held in September at Yacht Club de Monaco, attracted an audience of over 250 industry professionals for seminar discussions and the all-important award presentations. The mission of the event is to promote the development of marinas with reduced impact on the environment.
Smart & Sustainable award winners and judges. Photo: Arthur.G
Fifty start-ups, and 20 marinas and architects from 26 nations competed for the four awards.
The Norwegians from Snohetta, whose semi-submerged building fits so well into its marine environment, its architecture symbolising the essence of a marina as a link between land and sea, won the 2022 International Smart & Sustainable Architecture Coup de Coeur Award. Winners of the Architect category were the Austrians from NBAX and their project to rehabilitate an old shipyard in the town centre of Sanya, China.
The International Award in the Marina category went to the Flisvos project in Greece. The judges deemed the marina to be like a model of a town where the architectural aesthetics are in total harmony with the surrounding marine environment. Flisvos embraces a range of environmental goals including optimisation of energy and water use with the territory and the town.
Ra’anan Ben-Zur, CEO and developer of the Habacoa (Bahamas) project, accepted the 2022 International Smart & Sustainable Coup de Coeur Award. The marina is 160mi (257km) south of Florida on the main maritime route from the USA to the Caribbean. Designed with the environment in mind, the marina makes every effort to protect south Habacoa’s biodiversity and pristine environment. The project will make full use of year-round sunshine to meet a big proportion of its energy needs.
The much-anticipated and hotly contested Start-up Award was made to ECOncrete (in the biodiversity category). This Israeli start-up produces an innovative concrete for maritime constructions that enables them to store carbon and preserve biodiversity.
A delighted Philippe Leblanc, European sales manager ECOncrete, said: “What an honour it is for us to get this prize, especially in the biodiversity category. Our company developed and produces a unique bio-energy concrete technology designed to promote the marine environment and biodiversity with a range of options to help build responsible coastal and marine constructions. We are convinced we have a solution to help build the marinas of the future. It is therefore a real honour to have this opportunity to network with this amazing ecosystem.”
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