Australia has 30-plus buildings shortlisted for the World Architecture Festival
It’s such a reflection of the anomalous times we’re enduring that so many of the wonderful Australian projects announced on Tuesday as being shortlisted of the annual international architecture Olympics, the World Architecture Festival, are currently shuttered for the duration of the eastern states’ lockdown.
Amazing, expensive and imaginative buildings made for hospitality, entertainment, office occupation, shopping, health, athletics or for armies of students, and that have just been selected as being of world-class design are closed to visitation or the uses for which they were made.
As with the Olympics about to start in Tokyo, the WAF was deferred last year by the pandemic, and selected entrants from 2020 have been bundled in with those of the 2021 competition, which will, hopefully, convene in Lisbon in early December to decide the overall winners.
The delay means that quite a few of the buildings representing Australia have by now become both familiar to us and much celebrated in our own awards systems: The remarkable arts centre that shows brick can become almost fluid, Sydney’s Phoenix Central Park, is competing in the cultural category alongside JPW’s square-shouldered and very concrete Chau Chak Wing Museum, at the University of Sydney.
Of the 17 entries in the culture group, eight are from China. It’s notable that across the 20 different categories of this increasingly prestigious competition, now in its 13th year, China is showing up as the major force – numerically overwhelming, in almost all groupings.
But Australian sporting facilities, all by Cox Architecture and various associates, that include the redevelopments of the Ken Rosewall Arena in Sydney and the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne, and in the extended basket of the two years of shortlisted entries, the quite beautiful Queensland Country Bank Stadium in Townsville, give us three possible winners in the slim ranks of international stadia.
Always attempting to reflect the zeitgeist – which of course encompasses the adjusted thinking introduced by the global pandemic – this year’s WAF theme is “Resetting the City: Greening, Health and Urbanism”.
China is also strong on sustainable and nature-conscious projects, with 10 of the 14 shortlisted nature-based landscape entries.
But in the urban landscape class, Australia has two starters: Lyons with ASPECT Studios’ Prahran Square project in Melbourne and Turf Design Studio’s Sydney Park Water Re-Use project, a gorgeous new people’s park with the twin task of being a recreation space and cleansing and diverting rivers of stormwater that used to befoul Botany Bay.
China represents half of the 14 other entries in this group.
In the overall international shortlist of 478 projects from 62 countries for 2021, Australian forms are as amorphous as much of the new housing and commercial buildings around the globe.
Wood Bagot’s Collins Arch building, already known to Melburnians as the “Pantscraper”, is shortlisted in mixed-use.
Terroir’s fantastically faceted Penguin Parade Visitor Centre is as structurally sophisticated as Kirk’s Mon Repos Turtle Centre near Bundaberg, both in the display category.
The UTS Central building, by fjmt, that opened in 2019 as a student hub, is such a statement multi-circular building on Broadway in Sydney that it has become a landmark at the gateway to the central city. Alongside it in the higher education category is Grimshaw’s Monash University Woodside Building for Technology and Design.
Overall, Australia has more than 30 buildings in the 20/21 completed buildings shortlist. While some are conventional, square and made to meet the pavements and boundaries, others are just as unconventionally exploring the warping and form deviations that new material technology is allowing.
One of the sideline events at the annual WAF is Future Projects, which looks at buildings on the drawing board or just now coming out of the ground around the globe.
If Foster + Partners’ images for the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi are anything to go by, the future of architecture looks ever more daring and ingenious.
The WAF will take place from December 1-3 in Lisbon, Portugal.
