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This Year’s Best Architectural Works

The wait is finally over. Find out which projects came out on top at this year’s World Architecture Festival 2016.

This Year’s Best Architectural Works

The 2016 Building of the Year goes to The National Museum in Szczecin – The Dialogue Centre. Located in Poland, the building features an underground museum with an open ground-level rooftop that hosts various public activities. Designed by Robert Konieczny of KWK Promes, the Museum responds to the site’s war history, which left a hole in the city centre.

“To go underground is to explore the memory and archaeology of the city,” said the jury, who added that the design addresses the past in “an optimistic, poetic and imaginative way.”

The Future Project of the Year goes to the South Melbourne Primary School by Hayball. The new vertical school model integrates indoor and outdoor teaching facilities, as well as differentiated learning environments, all of which are connected by a central staircase that doubles up as an interactive learning zone.

Situated in Kowloon Bay, the ZCB Bamboo Pavilion by The Chinese University of Hong Kong School of Architecture won Small Project of the Year. The pavilion is made up of 473 large bamboo poles that were bent on site and hand-tied with metal wires, creating a four-storey structure that caters to a seating capacity of 200 people. The bamboo grid shell structure was commended for revitalising traditional Cantonese bamboo scaffolding.

The Chengdu City Music Hall project by Aedas won the Future Projects: Competition Entries category. The poetic building is inspired by an abstract analysis of the ‘Shan Shui’ style painting – “shan” meaning mountain, and “shui” meaning river.

Singapore’s first integrated public complex Kampung Admiralty by WOHA won the Commercial Mixed-Use Future Projects category. Catering to an aging population, the building integrates healthcare, social and commercial amenities under one roof, fostering cross-generational community bonding to promote active aging in place.

Shenzhen project Floating Fields by Thomas Chung was the Production, Energy and Recycling winner. Composed of open-air shallow rectangular partitions filled with growing fields, the judges found the project to be “collaborative in nature – involving many diverse stakeholders, taking into consideration the entire life cycle and educating an entire region”.

The winning projects of this year seem to point towards community-driven, holistic and sustainable architectural approaches that inspire societal togetherness.

The other projects that won include a shelter for the victims of domestic violence in Israel; a series of beach hut-style tree houses in Singapore that educates the public about waste pollution and more. See the full list of winners here.

Click here to read our coverage on the INSIDE World Festival of Interiors 2016.

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