‘An example of bold, contemporary architectural thinking,” said World Architecture Festival director Paul Finch of “The Interlace”, a residential development designed by OMA/Buro Ole Scheeren, which has been crowned World Building of the Year 2015 at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore earlier this month.
“The project presents an alternative way of thinking about developments which might otherwise become generic tower clusters.”
In an interview with Life before the awards announcement, the festival director spoke of the shift he has been observing since the inauguration of the festival in 2008.
“[These days], there’s much more attention to landscape, energy and the environment,” said Finch. “This sort of attitude is very interesting and architects’ priorities are beginning to change from mere aesthetics to being very conscious about the morality of being wasteful.” Stacked in complex hexagonal layers around eight large-scale courtyards, The Interlace is one of the most ambitious residential projects in Singapore’s history, abandoning the default architectural housing patterns. Thirty-one apartment blocks were laid in an intricate horizontal network, which is a mixed use of living, social spaces and the natural environment.
But more than just about competition, Finch said the festival is essentially an event for architects to remind themselves why they fell in love with architecture. The three-day fair showcases some of the best architecture projects shortlisted in each category — from Civic and Community, House, Housing, Culture, Religion, Mixed Use, to Hotel and Leisure — along with a series of talks with more than 2,000 architects from 65 countries. Next year’s festival will be held in Berlin.
Copenhagen-based BIG Bjarke Ingells Group took the “Future Project of the Year” award for their Vancouver House in Canada. With a limited space challenge, trisected by an overpass, BIG’s solution was resorting to structural innovation, which allowed the base of the building to be precariously slender before blooming into a full structure on a higher level.
ONS Incek residence showroom and sales office by Yazgan Design Architecture.
“This is a delightful project that generates an exemplar new urban typology,” said festival judges. “Mitigating the destructive impact of the highway flyover and creating an opportunity from a typically abandoned public space. It will impact positively on many future municipality and developer-led agendas for cities across the world.”
Other awards include “Landscape of the Year 2015”, which went to Yanweizhou Park in China, a project by Turenscape International, praised for having “significant impact on flood migration and use of bridges to playfully knit the locality together, creating communities on both sides of the river”.
Another notable award was the “Colour Prize” — presented in association with AkzoNobel, a leading global paint and coatings company, and major producer of speciality chemicals, which returns as “Headline Sponsor” of the event for the third year running — which went to the ONS Incek showroom and sales office, Turkey, by Yazgan Design Architecture. The judges felt that “the use of colour contributed to a strong piece of architecture that saw form and colour integrate seamlessly”. “The quality of the submissions this year has been exceptionally high,” said Jeremy Rowe, managing director of AkzoNobel Decorative Paints, Southeast Asia & Pacific, “and we are very honoured to sponsor this prestigious accolade that celebrates the use of colour to transform architectures.”
As is its tradition for many years, AkzoNobel has announced “Monarch Gold” as the colour of 2016. Rowe said that although colour’s role in architecture overall is somewhat limited to the surface, it has always been one of the most crucial ways in establishing an identity. Colour is something architects rely on when it comes to making the building stand out. Responding to the shift in the architecture industry from being just about aesthetics to become more environmentally conscious in recent years, Rowe said it’s more of a coating question rather than colour.
“It’s rather the question of what’s in the paint,” said Rowe. “How long it lasts, low or high emission. We always try to make coatings which have low emission and last a long time, ones that reflect heat and reduce pollution. That’s the key of passive sustainability.”
Running alongside the awards programme and a number of keynote speeches and live panel debates, there was also a “Student Charrette” live workshop in which seven universities were invited to reimagine our cities for the future, with students demonstrating their potential. Beating off universities in Spain, UK and across Asia, the School of Architecture Planning in Bhopal, India won the prize with their project “City of Lakes”.
