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Student Benedictus Award goes to Tampere University student for religion study center in Japan

The 1995 Student DuPont Benedictus Award went to Juha Mäki-Jyllilä, an architectural student at Tampere University of Technology in Tampere, Finland. This is the second year in a row in which a student of Tampere professor Juhani Katainen has won first place in the student design competition – especially impressive in light of the student competition's record number of entries. More than 1700 students from 203 schools in 45 countries participated in the competition and the students' names, schools and professors are not identified during the judging process.

This year's student design challenge incorporated laminated glass, often used in areas of high winds, into the design of a center for the study of world religions and cultures near an ancient Shinto shrine virtually destroyed by a typhoon last year. The center would include a visitor's orientation center for the restored shrine, Itsukushima, located on Miyajima Island in the Inland Sea of Japan.

Fumihiko Maki, principal, Fumihiko Maki and Associates of Tokyo and a member of this year's Benedictus Awards panel of judges, said: "From all the projects, it's the one that best responds to the conditions of the site … and integrates the glass into the architecture as the subject for the whole scheme."