WAF Winners

WAF's special format brings architects from all over the world together to present their projects and have juries pick winners in numerous categories; those winners are highlighted in the right column. Each of the winners is then in the running for the World Building of the Year and Future Project of the Year, for completed and "future" projects, respectively. Below we highlight those winners, as well as some of the other special winners and a few of the categories won by World-Architects member firms.

WAF started in 2008 and was held in Barcelona its first four years, followed by four years in Singapore. Next year the ninth WAF will be held in Berlin. For more on the festival, read our 2013 interview with WAF director and founder Paul Finch.

The Interlace (Singapore)
OMA/Ole Scheeren

After last year's award to a small chapel in Vietnam, this year's super jury went in the opposite direction and gave the World Building of the Year award to the humongous Interlace building in Singapore. Started in 2007, when Ole Scheeren was a partner and OMA (he left in 2010 to start his eponymous firm), the project with more than 1,000 residences on 8 hectares was completed two years ago.

Six-story blocks are stacked in hexagonal arrangements to create courtyard and shared rooftop spaces. Though not quite the "radical reinterpretation of contemporary life" that Scheeren contends (it's too upscale to be radical), it's hard to deny the project's scale and the unexpected relationships created through the regular stacking of what would be sizable buildings in and of themselves elsewhere.

Vancouver House (Canada)
BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group

We first learned about BIG's design of a 500-foot-tall residential tower next to highway overpass in Vancouver during a studio visit in early 2013. A lot has happened in those two-and-half years: BIG has moved from Chelsea to a bigger office in Lower Manhattan, and the tower has changed names from the Beach + Howe project to Vancouver House. But the form has stayed the same – the plan moves from a triangular plan at the base to a rectangular plan at the top. The base contains offices, shops and other functions, while the tower houses 500 apartments.

Yanweizhou Park (China)
Turenscape

WAF focuses almost exclusively on buildings, with awards for interiors projects held in the separate Inside festival that takes place at the same time and venue. One exception within WAF is the Landscape of the Year award, which doesn't go through the same multi-category weaning process as the buildings but results in a winner that is just as striking. Turenscape's resilient landscape for Yanweizhou Park in Jinhua City was designed to adapt to the monsoon floods. Colorful footbridges connect the park to the city and provide a means of access over the river's rising waters.

Lidingövallen (Sweden)
DinellJohansson

Starting this year, architects whose projects were shortlisted in one of the completed building categories could submit them for consideration in this special prize for small projects. The "Little Bird Nest" that Kalle Dinell and Morten Johansson designed for Lidingo Football Club took the inaugural award. The project combines seating, offices, and a cafe in one structure that looks as good full as it does empty.

ONS INCEK Showroom & Sales Office (Turkey)
Yazgan Design Architecture

This year marks the second time for the special prize that rewards creative ways of integrating color on the exterior of a building. The showroom that Yazgan Design Architecture designed for a three-tower complex with nearly 1,000 residences beat out eight other projects to win. The undulating exterior is wrapped with a gradient of colored fins that give the building a shifting presence depending on one's location.

Hotel & Leisure
Lanserhof, Lake Tegern (Germany)
Ingenhoven Architects

The Lanserhof resort in Southern Bavaria offers 70 rooms and suites with a combination of luxury hotel facilities and state-of-the-art medical care under one roof. The design by Ingenhoven Architects integrates the building into the landscape while layering larch wood screens over the large expanses of glass.

Competition Entries
Quay Quarter (Australia)
Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp

This category allows firms that did not win competitions to receive some kudos for their designs. FJMT was one of six finalists for the Quay Quarter competition in Sydney, which was won by 3XN and also included Ingenhoven, Morphosis, MVRDV and SANAA. To win this time, FJMT bested eight shortlisted projects at WAF, including Form4 Architecture's Lyrical Seashore.

Experimental
Home Farm (Singapore)
SPARK

SPARK's conceptual proposal combines two seemingly unrelated functions: seniour housing and urban agriculture. According to SPARK, "The research-based design addresses two pressing challenges faced by Singapore: how the city state might support a rapidly aging society, and how it might enhance its food security (90% of which is currently imported)."

Office
Reservoir (India)
Sanjay Puri Architects

Mumbai's Sanjay Puri won the future office category with a design that looks to history, specifically the ancient stepwells in India's western regions. His design for an office in the desert region of Rajasthan will be built from local sandstone to integrate the building into its context physically as well as culturally.