The 15th edition of the annual World Architecture Festival took place between 30 November and 2 December 2022 in Lisbon. With 45 category winners, architects, designers and creatives from across the world took home coveted awards for completed buildings, future projects, landscapes and interiors, in categories ranging from the best health, sports and office buildings, to architectural photography and the best use of colour.
Quay Quarter Tower by 3XN in Sydney, Australia, took home the prestigious World Building of the Year Award. The vertical village was designed by Danish architectural practice 3XN to ‘humanise the high-rise’. The 206-metre-tall structure comprises five shifting volumes stacked on top of each other and arranged around an atrium that faces the iconic Sydney Harbour.
Paul Finch, Programme Director of the World Architecture Festival, described Quay Quarter Tower as ‘an excellent example of adaptive reuse’: 3XN was commissioned to provide a building on a world-class site, and to retain a huge proportion of an existing fifty-year-old commercial tower. ‘It has an excellent carbon story, and it is an example of anticipatory workspace design produced pre-Covid which nevertheless has provided healthy and attractive space for post-pandemic users,’ Finch added.
Future Project of the Year 2022 went to Dream Pathway in Iran by CAATStudio (Kamboozia Architecture and Design Studio), while the Pingtan Children’s Library in Hunan, China, by Condition_Lab won the World Interior of the Year prize. The Auditorium Building at Sol Plaatje University by South African firm URBA Architects and Urban Designers won a Completed Building award in the ‘higher education and research’ category.
Submissions for the 2022 awards were judged by a panel of international experts made up of Tracy Meller, senior partner at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, South African architect Jo Noero, Melbourne-based architect John Wardle, Issa Diabaté from Koffi & Diabaté Architectes in Côte d’Ivoire, and Murat Tabanlioglu from Istanbul-based Tabanlioglu Architects.
The next World Architecture Festival will take place in 2023 in Singapore.
Read more
Pic credit: World Architecture Festival.
