Patterson Associates’ Ravenscar House in Christchurch took out the top award for Completed Buildings, Culture, and RTA Studio’s soon-to-be-built Fisher & Paykel Global Headquarters in Auckland was highly commended in the Futureglass Prize, having earlier received a WAFX award.

The World Building of the Year award went to the Huizhen High School by Approach Design Studio/Zhejiang University of Technology Engineering Design Group in China.

The architects describe the boarding school campus as a ‘floating forest’, with classrooms hung in each corner of the forest and joined by meandering paths. Scattered tree houses provide students with ‘temporary escapes’ and a ramp leads up to a gently sloped roof. This roof doubles as an open-air lecture hall and a rooftop park with sporting facilities, usable by the public at the weekend, creating a new typology of architectural promenade.

The World Interior of the Year went to 19 Waterloo Street by Australian practice SJB, a project that utilises expanded connections creatively within a limited footprint, resulting in a quiet, open oasis in the city. The judges said the highly tuned stack of rooms “generated a satisfying alignment and play of light”, with craft and detail evident everywhere, partly as a result of using materials salvaged from other projects.

The Future Project of the Year went to The Probiotic Tower by Design and More International in Egypt. The tower’s central proposition is to repurpose obsolete water towers as an adaptive system for cities to address climate change positively, particularly in the developing world.

The Landscape of the Year went to Benjakitti Forest Park: Transforming a Brownfield into an Urban Ecological Sanctuary by Turenscape, and Arsomsilp Community and Environmental Architect in Thailand. The project has transformed a former tobacco factory into a resilient living ecosystem, which is now the largest public recreational space in downtown Bangkok. It reduces the force of stormwater, filters contaminated water and provides much-needed wildlife habitat in a region experiencing monsoon climates, with an average yearly precipitation of around 1500mm.

The Completed Buildings, Civic and Community award went to the Taiwan-Reyhanli Centre for World Citizens by Chen-Yu Chiu and Studio Cho in Turkey.

The 17th edition of the festival will again be held at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, from 6 to 8 November 2024.

>>>Editor of Architecture NZ, Chris Barton, was invited to be part of the WAF 2023 jury. His editorial Everyone’s a critic can be read here.