WAF: The Latest Architecture and News

The World Architecture Festival (WAF) is thrilled to announce the first distinguished members of its 2024 judging panel. This esteemed group comprises some of the world's most respected architects, designers, and industry leaders.

The 17th edition of WAF is welcoming submissions from architects and designers worldwide until 19th April 2024. The festival will take place at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore from the 6-8th November 2024. In addition to the unique live-judged awards programme and crit presentations, this year's event will include fringe events, an exhibition and keynote talks from an international panel of speakers.

The Architecture Drawing Prize, now in its 7th edition, celebrates the art of drawing in three main categories: hand-drawn, digital, and hybrid. The Prize attracted nearly 250 drawings from around the world, a record for the competition, with the majority of entries being in the hand-drawn category. The winners of each category have been announced. The winning drawings, along with the shortlisted entries will be displayed at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore from 29 November until 1 December 2023, and at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London from 31 January to 3 March 2024. The Overall Winner will announced on 29 January 2024 as part of a webinar hosted by Sir John Soane’s Museum, ahead of the exhibition.

According to the jury, the technologies used by the entrants to find creative ways of depicting buildings generated probing discussions among the jury members, testing the nature and definition of architectural drawing. Sponsored by Iris Ceramica Group, the Architecture Drawing Prize is co-curated by Make Architects, Sir John Soane’s Museum and World Architecture Festival (WAF).

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Global Architecture Development (GAD) has presented the New Tashkent City master plan, shortlisted in the Master planning category at the World Architecture Festival (WAF) 2023. This comprehensive vision hopes to propel Tashkent, Uzbekistan, into a new development phase through their design strategies. The New Tashkent City master plan attempts to carefully examine critical aspects of traditional city planning, setting up lasting development goals for the design. In fact, it includes efforts to strengthen infrastructure, support economic growth, improve community involvement, and enhance environmental services. Overall, the design hopes to raise the city’s overall livability.

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Most biennales and architecture events, especially the recent ones, have influenced and shaped the dialogue of the ones that followed. In fact, during a conversation earlier this year with Lesley Lokko, the curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, she explained and affirmed that “all exhibitions […] take sustenance from those that came before”, further noting that “if I look back at the dozen or so Architecture Exhibitions over the past twenty years, each one has contributed in some way to the discourse of the next.”

So far, 2023 has witnessed significant events in the architectural world, ranging from the XXIII Architecture Biennial in Santiago, Chile, and the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, KSA, to Milan Design Week and Salone del Mobile in Milan, Italy, as well as the Venice Biennale and the UIA World Congress of Architects in Copenhagen. Addressing both contextual and global themes, this year continues to contribute to the international architectural discussion.

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Captivated by cinematographic references and the narrative space, Ole Scheeren's work stands out by its disruptive solutions to the present social challenges and the cities we live in. With more than 30 years of career in the architecture field, Ole Scheeren has won several awards and one of its most iconic works includes the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing when was director and partner at OMA, before founding Büro Ole Scheeren.

In this interview, documented at the World Architecture Festival 2022, Scheeren discusses the importance of the narrative of a project and the quality architecture has by building the stages where people live: "the fictional anticipation of life".

The tenth edition of the Architectural Photography Awards has announced its shortlist, selected from entries from 64 different countries. The photographs are divided into six categories: Exterior, Interior, Sense of Place, Buildings in Use, Mobile, with Bridges being this year’s theme, and Portfolio, focusing on the theme of Transport Hubs. The photographs will be displayed at the World Architecture Festival (WAF) Lisbon in Portugal from 30th November - 2nd December. The winners, two per category, will be announced by the end of the festival.

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Entries to the annual Architecture Drawing Prize are judged in three categories, hand-drawn, digital and hybrid. Last year, Dafni Filippa, a post-graduate student studying for a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture (MLA) at the Bartlett School of Architecture, won in the hybrid category and was also judged overall winner of the Prize with her Flood-responsive landscape performance, a virtuoso drawing created through a variety of rendering and modelling techniques produced by hand, in plaster and through and across multiple software platforms.

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The World Architecture Festival (WAF) revealed the 420 shortlist for this year’s festival, with entries from all around the world, including Portugal, Malaysia, Finland, Mexico, Turkey, Australia, Japan, India, and the UK. The awards program celebrates the best new completed buildings and landscape design projects, ranging from rural villas to contemporary religious buildings and healthcare facilities built during the pandemic.

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World Architecture Festival will take place in Lisbon, from the 30 November – 2 December 2022. This year’s WAF theme is ‘Together’. Festival speakers and participants will be invited to consider how architecture is responding to the renewal of collective life post-pandemic, and in the light of commitments to combatting climate change.

World Architecture Festival has revealed the winners for this year’s categories, highlighting buildings and landscapes completed across the world between 2019 and 2021. Chosen from almost 500 shortlisted projects from 62 countries, the winning projects showcase exemplary contributions to the built environment reflecting this edition’s theme: ‘Resetting the City: Greening, Health and Urbanism’. In addition to the completed buildings categories, the annual award also announced Copenhill, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, as the 2021 World Building, while SLA was awarded Landscape of the Year for its design of Al Fay Park.

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The Architecture Drawing Prize is celebrating its fifth year and continues to attract outstanding entries from around the world. This year has been exceptional in the number and strength of student submissions the Prize has attracted across its three categories for entry: hand-drawn, hybrid and digital. In fact, the winning drawings for all three categories are by students.

The Architectural Photography Awards 2021 has announced its shortlist for its ninth edition. Supported by Aluprof UK and the World Architecture Festival (WAF), the shortlist was selected from around 2000 entries and 42 countries, "highlighting the expertise of architectural photography and focusing on the skill and creativity of the photographer". The photographs are divided into 6 categories: Exterior, Interior, Sense of Place, Buildings in Use, Mobile, which this year’s theme is Greening the City, and Portfolio with the theme of Building with History.

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This short essay, written by the author and critic Jonathan Glancey, coincides with the launch of the inaugural Architecture Drawing Prize – a competition curated by the World Architecture Festival, the Sir John Soane's Museum, and Make. The deadline for the award is the 17th of September 2021.

“Is graphicacy a word?” asks Ken Shuttleworth, founder of Make Architects and instigator of The Architecture Drawing Prize. It is. “Like literacy”, he says, “, it’s certainly what I’m interested in when looking at and judging drawings. It’s about a fluency in making and understanding them.” The Architecture Drawing Prize is in its fifth year now. “We tend to see very few hand drawings by young architects - they mostly use computers - and, today, most architectural students come from more of a maths and physics than an art background. I still believe, though, that hand drawing is very important.”

Some of the best architecture by today’s foremost practices is revealed as the World Architecture Festival (WAF) Awards announces its 2021 shortlist, celebrating buildings and landscapes to have been completed across the world between 2019 and 2021. The 200-strong shortlist has been selected from over 700 entries from countries ranging from China and Japan to Mexico and Ecuador.

Twelve big-picture architectural initiatives addressing some of the world’s most pressing challenges have won the first of this year’s World Architecture Festival (WAF) Awards. The 2021 WAFX Awards celebrate project proposals from across the world tackling today’s global issues, ranging from pandemic control and the climate emergency, to social equity, cultural identity, aging populations, and food supply.

The World Architecture Festival just announced the launch of WAFVirtual from 30 November – 4 December 2020, where the worldwide architectural community can engage in a week of live content, special prizes, talks, panel discussions and networking opportunities with peers and our WAF partners. Registration will be free for architects and design professionals.

World Architecture Festival and World Festival of Interiors: Inside is scheduled for 2 – 4 December, in Lisbon.  Preparations for the event are going ahead in the typical way and architects from across the globe are continuing to submit their online awards entries.