The World Architecture Festival (WAF) was held in Singapore in early November. Since its inauguration in 2008, it has been staged for 17 consecutive years. Four recent projects were named as overall winners. Darlington Public School by Sydney-based practice fjcstudio (formerly Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp) won World Building of the Year; Future Project of the Year was awarded to Küçükçekmece Djemevi by EAA – Emre Arolat Architecture in Istanbul; Pang Mei Noodle Bar LFS by Office AIO was given the Interior of the Year award and Shenzhen Guanlan Riverside Plaza by LAY-OUT Planning Consultants won the Landscape of the Year award. In my conversation with Paul Finch (b. 1949, London), the founder and program director of WAF, we discussed this year’s World Building of the Year, WAF’s history, the selection and judging process, the latest shifts and trends in architecture, what to expect next year when the festival comes to Miami and reasons for architects’ participation in WAF.

Vladimir Belogolovsky (VB): WAF premiered in 2008. For the first four years, it was held in Barcelona. For the next four years, it relocated to Singapore. It then returned to Europe, first hosted in Berlin and then in Amsterdam; in 2020 and 2021, it went online, then to Lisbon before being welcomed back by Singapore in 2023 and this year. Could you touch on WAF’s origins? 

Paul Finch (PF): At the time of conceiving and launching WAF, I was editing the Architectural Review (AR), where, since 2006, the magazine ran a joint award program called Cityscape Architectural Review Awards, or CARA, with a focus on regions outside of Europe and North America. That experience became the basis for starting a more global festival. MIPIM, a major global real estate trade show held annually in Cannes, France, has also become an important reference for us. However, these events were mainly about finance and investments, not architecture, as its primary interest, and that’s what we wanted to focus on. Of course, there are architectural biennales, triennales and annual regional festivals, but we wanted to create a truly global event and awards program open to any architect, providing a platform for projects to be judged and celebrated annually; we wanted to take an architectural snapshot of what architectural thinking is right now.

VB: Did you leave your position as the editor of Architectural Review to focus on WAF?

PF: I left at the end of the year. WAF was launched in 2008, but we are still all part of one company. AR is a popular magazine that started in 1896 with an extensive network through which we contacted many architects to see if there was an appetite for such an event, and there was! There was interest both in submitting projects and attending WAF as visitors. Then we started shaping it—it couldn’t be just another conference, exhibition or awards program. It had to be a hybrid of all three with another overlap of local building visits and networking opportunities. Most of all, we wanted to remind architects why they fell in love with architecture in the first place and celebrate the power of design. Then we consulted with our parent company, emap Publishing, which at the time owned close to 200 professional and consumer publications, including Architects’ Journal, and decided this would be worth launching. A couple of years earlier, we launched another event for the retail market called the World Retail Congress in Barcelona, which has also been successful. All that experience gave us a lot of confidence. In addition to this, Norman Foster agreed to chair our first super jury, and once he came on board, there was a lot of enthusiasm from others.

VB: 2008 wasn’t all that rosy because that’s when the world financial crisis occurred, right?

PF: It came slightly after we formed the team and won commitments from our key sponsors. We are grateful to those who stayed with us through the years because, in 2009, we lost three of our key sponsors. We didn’t make any money in the first few years, but eventually, the festival became profitable. Our main sponsor, Grohe, has been with us since the first year, and for several years, we have survived. Thanks to them, we now have other important sponsors as well, and we can continue the ethos of Architectural Review, which is about informing professionals about great contemporary architecture and celebrating its most outstanding achievements.

VB: Competitions are typically done behind closed doors. What makes WAF special is that the shortlisted architects present their projects live in crit rooms to judging panels. Could you touch on this setup?

PF: This year, we had 17 crit rooms with simultaneous discussions. Our ideal would be to visit all the buildings and examine each project more closely. But as this isn’t possible, we thought let’s instead ‘visit’ the architects or ask them to visit us at the festival. Let them present live and let the audience hear the judges critique their projects in front of everyone. That is very unusual. That’s the heart of WAF’s approach.

VB: This year, almost 500 shortlisted projects were presented. How many were submitted?

PF: We shortlist about 50 per cent of all the submitted projects—all entries are anonymous. We select projects in London with around a dozen judges from local and international practices. We physically look at all entry boards by sorting projects by categories and splitting judges into pairs. In addition to the categories, we introduced prizes for the shortlisted projects, awarded horizontally across various categories. For example, we awarded a project for the use of colour, another one for how natural light is utilised, and other awards for ways to reduce carbon footprint. This means that every project is eligible for more than one prize.

VB: This year, the Building of the Year Award was won by Darlington Public School by fjcstudio. Do you have any insights about this project?

PF: All four winning projects this year were clear winners. Typically, close competition happens in categories, but then overall winners emerge. It is like judging at a dog show—it is a close call for different breed categories, but then the best-in-show winners stand out. Regarding this year’s winners, each case was a combination of factors—a lovely design and stimulating architecture aligned with a thorough and thoughtful analysis of a particular site, climate, culture, history and sociological program. Darlington Public School embraces the rich Aboriginal culture and artistic heritage of the site, and as a response to this, there is such an intelligent incorporation of landscape and inventive use of materials.

VB: Richard Francis Jones, co-founder of Sydney-based fjcstudio, became the first architect to win WAF’s top award, following his 2013 win (Building of the Year Award) for the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand. Isn’t it fascinating to see how architecture has changed in the hands of the same architect and how a very different kind of architecture, no longer focused on the spectacular, is now celebrated for different reasons? The Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi by David Adjaye, which might have won an award a decade ago, was left unnoticed this year because the profession’s attention has shifted beyond just architecture itself, right? 

PF: The jury of the Civic and Community category liked the Adjaye project and its radical proposition, but they didn’t think it was the best compared to the other shortlisted projects in its category. The two most noticeable things that have transformed architecture over the last decade are architects' responses to carbon and climate issues and the deeper engagement with people and their history, particularly Indigenous Peoples and minority groups. What can architecture do to repair the damage, both literally and metaphorically? Those shifts were already happening in 2008 when WAF began, but they have become a much stronger responsibility and a more common design approach. So, it is not just about investigating the site; it is also about sociology, ecology, community, history, economy, etc. I think the worst thing would be to treat all these as constraints, as all of these issues can inspire good architecture.

VB: WAF will be going to Miami for the next two years. What are your expectations and why was North America still not a part of it?

PF: We have long been ambitious about staging WAF in North America. We advocated for this for some time, particularly to host it in Miami because it is such a key city for North America, Central America and South America. It also has great architecture. And let’s face it: we are underrepresented by entries from South America and North America (given its size), although we do have support from countries such as Mexico and Brazil, and it is worth mentioning that many of our judges and speakers come from the US. Next year, we hope to attract the attention of many American architects while retaining our existing international audience.

VB: Why should architects participate in WAF?

PF: Apart from many lectures and conferences by renowned international speakers and networking events, I would particularly stress the opportunity for architects to see how their contemporaries present their work and what can be learned from that hands-on experience. Architects can also learn a lot from the judges of the super jury on the final third day when category winners present their projects again on bigger stages with larger audiences. That’s the experience you don’t get anywhere else. There is no such range of geography, building type, level of expertise and quality of architecture. Another quite underrated aspect is that once many architects leave college, most don’t see their peers under any pressure, but at WAF, they will see colleagues competing for awards. They will learn their presentation techniques, means of convincing their listeners and thoughts about their architecture, principles, priorities, etc. That’s very compelling, and I don’t think you can get that anywhere else. 

VB: You’ve been writing about architecture for over 50 years and came into architecture through writing after studying history at Selwyn College in Cambridge. What do you like most about it?

PF: I suppose it is optimism. Everything that architects do is about the future. To do that, you have to respond to challenges and believe that nothing is impossible. You have to believe that a combination of emotional sensibility, knowledge, and technological know-how can make things better! Architecture provides the backcloth to our lives—from where we are born, brought up, go to school, work, play and eventually, die. This story is the same for everybody; only the buildings are different. Buildings are unavoidable, but they are not inevitably good. Yet, compelling architecture can make life more meaningful.