How can architecture change the world? This year’s World Architecture Festival (WAF), held at Singapore’s Marina Bay, offers a glimpse into how design and visions for the future come together. At last week’s edition of the annual festival, which started in 2008, judges recognized proposals from international architects tackling ‘big world problems’ with the WAFX Pricefounded in the tenth year of the competition.
A school in Australia received the coveted World Building of the Year award. The Darlington public school in the Sydney suburb of Chippendale, by FJC Studio, preserves the region’s indigenous heritage through original mural designs and a community garden where native plants grow. Sinuous curves and natural light contribute to the organic forms of the brick structure in a concept that WAF program director Paul Finch called “poetic.” The building was selected from more than 200 shortlisted entries and 42 category winners.
Among the shortlisted winners is Islam El Mashtooly, architect and curator of the 2018 Egyptian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, whose concept won an award in the ‘Ethics and Values’ category.Resilient Gaza: a landscape of resistance.” In a description of the project, his architectural firm Design and More International focuses on land remediation and self-sufficiency and identifies the client as “humanity.”
“The previous year of the genocidal war against the people of Gaza has led us to consider a series of critical questions that build on the idea of what a new landscape of peace could look like in Gaza,” the project statement said.
Other winners included Filipino architectural designer Gloryrose Dy Metilla’s bandana-shaped vision for a provincial capital buildingAlireza Sherafati and Pantea Eslami’s concept for a women’s gymnastics in Iranand that of John Marx sphere “portal” for Nevada in the ‘Experimental’ category.
In the “Power and Justice” category, Metilla from Swito Designs was declared the winner for her project “Provincial Capitol of Maguindanao Del Norte”, a government building in the shape of a Maguindanoan tubaw hand-woven bandana intended as a ‘symbol of peace and unity’ in the region where the country The Moro armed conflict has unfolded. Metilla’s design will face east, the direction the Maguindanao community leader faces, according to a project statement.
Another winner of the WAFX “Ethics and Values” award focuses on women’s rights post-Iranian Revolution in the form of a sports complex called “Shahinshahr Women’s Park.” Architects Sherafati and Eslami of the Iranian firm Arsh 4D Studio are challenging the Islamic Republic of Iran’s implementation of parks for women, which emerged after the stark reversal of women’s rights in the country in 1979. criticism to further isolate and alienate their intended visitors.
“What role can an architect play in the face of power and ideology? Should you take an active or passive approach?” Sherafati and Eslami ask in their project statement. Although the design carries the ‘gene’ of the current regime, the architects acknowledge, it attempts to pave the way for change by including spaces where men and women can interact.
“We have tried to transform the six-meter thick wall into a border with a dual character, part of which belongs to the present and part of which is a desire to dream about the future,” they wrote.
Among the WAFX project winners, the only project in the United States was the “The Portal”, included in the ‘Digital and technology’ category. Lead architect John Marx’s design for a massive spherical hub in Reno embraces Metaverse technology to function as a “living laboratory” for emerging tools. In addition to screens that resemble a futuristic Times Square, the structure would house an intricate hydroponic system to recycle food waste, a convention center and housing.
“This year’s winners demonstrate how grand challenges affecting people and environments generate responses that address functional and social issues while lifting the spirits of those who will benefit from creative architecture and design,” Finch said in a statement.
