Meet the Winners of the World Architecture Festival 2022 (2024)

Quay Quarter Tower (QQT), designed by 3XN has been declared the World Building of the Year 2022 at the fifteenth annual World Architecture Festival (WAF), held in Lisbon.

The 206-meter tower, located close to the Sydney Opera House, is an office building arranged as a vertical village, creating a sense of community and providing spaces that focus on collaboration, health, well-being and external terraces.

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Constructed of five stacked shifting volumes, 3XN employed a radical sustainability strategy which involved upcycling the existing tower. The series of stacked atria create a social spine with exceptional views, while also allowing daylight deep into each floor.

Paul Finch, Programme Director of the World Architecture Festival commented: "The winner 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. The result was an excellent example of adaptive re-use. 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. The client was prepared to risk building out an idea on a speculative basis - it worked".

The winner was selected by a super jury of luminaries of the global architecture industry – comprising Tracy Meller, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners; Jo Noero, Noero Architects; John Wardle, John Wardle Architects; Issa Diabaté, Koffi & Diabaté Architectes, and Murat Tabanlioglu, Tabanlioglu Architects.

World Interior of the Year

Pingtan Children Library by Condition_Lab, has been named World Interior of the Year for 2022. The project, located in China, has been selected from a shortlist of 11 categories to win the final accolade.

The library is a small timber structure, which draws on a typology of traditional ‘Dong Houses’ and is primarily composed of two interwoven spiral staircases. The value of the project is concentrated in the animation and preservation of traditional culture for the young users and the discipline of the design, highlighting the social importance of architecture.

Judges were impressed by the “traditional craftmanship” of the design for children, “the real users of this delightful structure, where they can play on the steps, reach for a book or peak at their friends”. They congratulated Condition_Lab on creating “a space for the community and achieving it”.

The INSIDE World Interior of the Year award was judged by INSIDE festival’s 2022 super-jurors: Linzi Cassels, Perkins + Will; Ann Lau, Hayball; Eva Jiřičná, AI – DESIGN; Johnny Chiu, J.C. Architecture, and Nigel Coates.

Future Project of the Year

The Future Project of the Year 2022, celebrates the best of the world’s architecture that is yet to be completed. The winning project was awarded to Dream Pathway / The connection between the sports recreation park to a cultural street, in Iran, designed by CAATStudio (Kamboozia Architecture and Design Studio).

The project showcases an urban pedestrian and cyclist pathway in the western part of the Abbas Abad hills complex in Tehran. The project, once complete, will aim to create an interactive-attractive narrative in the city which moves users between four different zones through the use of rammed earth material and geometric forms.

WAF’s Future Project super jury, included: Shane O'Toole, University College Dublin; Sir Peter Cook; Nadia Tromp, Ntsika Architects; Mario Cucinella, MCA - Mario Cucinella Architects, and Yui Tezuka, Tezuka Architects.

Judges described the project as an “original architectural and urban concept that lives up to its project title and ambition” and congratulated it on its “exquisitely controlled geometry” which they felt “provided a surprising continuity” between the “city's street pattern and the district's new parkland destination”.

Landscape of the Year

Landscape of the Year 2022was awarded to SHANCUN Atelier, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University + Anshun Institute of Architectural Design for its project Preservation and Rehabilitation of Rural Landscape of Gaodang: A Buyi Ethnic Minority Group Village in Southwest China. The project was selected as the winner from the Landscape Rural category.

WAF’s Landscape of the Year super jury, included: Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Landscape Design; Lily Jencks, LilyJencksStudio | JencksSquared; Mariana Simas, studio mk27, and Zaš Brezar, Landzine.

The judges praised the project as an “incredibly sensitive village conservation scheme, breathing life back into rural China”. The project brings together a rich diversity of stakeholders over the last seven years, to realize a design that ensures this rural community will last into the future.

World Architecture Festival 2023

The festival will reconvene in 2023 in Singapore for its 16th edition from 29 November to 1 December. Registration is now open.