These unbuilt concepts, imagined in Ahmedabad, India, and Mexico City, won over the 2017 AZ Awards jury with their originality.

Project: Iskcon Temple

Location: Ahmedabad, India

Firm: Sanjay Puri Architects, India

Team: Sanjay Puri with Deep Dodiya and Nimish Shah

According to Mumbai architect Sanjay Puri, construction will soon begin on this cool Hare Krishna temple in Ahmedabad, a western Indian city where summer temperatures regularly exceed 40 degrees Celsius. The temple, which will hold 5,000 worshipers when complete, will feature a monumental shikhara – a customary rounded conical roof – with its apex located above the site’s main deity. But in a break with tradition, Puri plans to mass progressively larger two-dimensional slices of the shikhara’s silhouette into a 46-metre mega-structure, with lattice-filled spaces between the planes to filter light into the interior and help with natural airflow.

Project: Zacatecas

Location: Mexico City, Mexico

Firm: Belzberg Architects, U.S.

Team: Hagy Belzberg, Brock DeSmit, Jessica Hong and Joseph Ramiro with David Cheung, Adrian Cortez, Udit Goel, Kristofer Leese and Corie Saxman

Blending a custom masonry block, a structural stacking assembly and an age-old building method has yielded something entirely novel: the expressive windscreens that will shield Belzberg Architects’ six-storey office building planned for the trendy Roma Norte neighbourhood of Mexico City. Three of the six concrete-masonry sails curve along multiple planes, seeming to billow as gently as a silk scarf, and defying gravity in a highly seismic region.

The custom masonry’s large diagonal cavities align to create uninterrupted channels for rebar, letting masons rotate the blocks along their vertical axis to create curves as lively as they are organic.