There were far-reaching proposals for healthcare, from an end-of-life hospice in the luscious sub-tropical surroundings of Madeira (Segmento Urbano), to recovery centres for addicts and military veterans (both in Texas by HKS), and a centre which combined healthcare and education in Evora, Portugal (Clou Architects).

The extremely thoughtful WAF veteran Vo Trong Nghia was also a double winner, with a waste-to-energy plant and a house prototype, both in his native Vietnam.

Imaginative approaches to building technology came from another WAFX veteran, Misak Tersibasyian, for a floating school in flood prone Bangladesh, innovative timber construction for a building housing social organisations and addressing the car-centric planning of Winnipeg (5468796), and the overall winner, Nikken Sekkei for Regeneration Tree, a prototype timber skyscraper which achieves a 40 per cent reduction in carbon use over its lifecycle compared to a similar conventional building.

One of the most satisfying groupings came from the five cultural identity prize- winners. They included the Grand Mosque in Medinah, Saudi Arabia (Pinnacle Design Studio) The Woodson African American Museum in St Petersburg Florida (Storyn Studio), Gelephu International Airport in Bhutan (BIG) and the Te Ara Tukutuku in Auckland, New Zealand, which resets a place of significance to the first nations which had become polluted from petrochemicals (LandLAB and Scape, and winner of the urban design category for future projects). The Grand Mosque showed how centuries of Islamic artistic heritage can be curated for contemporary society.

Everald Colas of Storyn Studio

The African American Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, a resonant place for that culture as it became a southern outpost of the Harlem Renaissance, originated with a population who migrated there at the end of the 19th century to build the railway that transported the Florida fruit crop. The design draws on recreation of traditional African as well as local history.

Frederik Lyng of BIG

The airport, part of Bhutan’s ambitious transition from feudal monarchy to a modern state, is the only known example in a jungle. It was also Future Project of the Year winner.

Other highlights included Foster’s head of urban design Nicola Scaranaro presenting their reconstruction of Antakya – the historic city of Antioch, after destruction by an earthquake in the power and justice category; Design & More’s reimagining of gulf labour camps as creative campuses also won the Future Projects Experimental category. The only winner for food was a memorable investigation of the notion of abundance provided by the Gir cow in India, looking into not just the spiritual significance by also animal welfare (gRID Architects).

The WAFX programme concluded with this year’s Water Prize, sponsored by GROHE. Established in 2017, this prize goes to a winner selected from proposals for innovative thinking about water as a means of sustaining life and contributing to sustainability. This year’s winner, chosen from more than 40 submissions, went to a ‘Water Space’ by the Mexican firm Rizoma del Agua, which proposes a prototype for a replicable water-dispensing facilities in the Chimalhuacán area of Mexico City but potentially in other locations too.

There were memorable keynotes on each of the three evenings, from Beatrice Galilee (day one), Juliane Wolf from Studio Gang on day two and the only person who so far has won WAF’s Building of the Year twice, Richard Francis-Jones, on Friday evening. Under the title ‘Architecture of Radical Repair’, Galilee, an innovative curator, movingly described the work of ‘The World Around’ an organisation she founded which seeks ideas about the environment from an extraordinarily broad range of sources, including a boy in a North African refugee camp who has created a garden to grow food for the community. It promotes a radical approach to repairing social breakdown.

Beatrice Galilee

Wolf explained the working practices of Studio Gang, and how they can bring joy to the designers, clients, users and the public. Many of their projects transform and find potential in a complicated context. Francis-Jones gave a typically thoughtful analysis of the myriad ‘anxieties’ which afflict architects and architecture, not sparing the institutional and educational framework that generates and sustains its beliefs. 

Richard Francis-Jones

A highlight on the Main Hall Stage was a second panel discussion (following one in 2024) curated by WAF in association with John Jennifer Marx of Form4 Architects. Picking up on his book Second Century Modernism the subject was the balance between reason and emotion, also examined in a small publication produced for the festival, written by Marx and your correspondent. Daniel Ibanez, an urbanist and educator from Spain, Lucy Tilley of Adjaye Associates and Meryati Blackwell from Marlon Blackwell Architects joined Marx and Melvin on the panel. 

Melvin, Ibanez, Blackwell, Tilley, Marx

For the first time this year, the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, who have supported a prize for beauty at WAF since 2023, decided to focus on beauty as shown in American buildings. A strong shortlisted presented to a jury of WAF curator Jeremy Melvin (chair), Mario Cucinella, Fernanda Patino Espinosa from Sordo Madaleno, Ronan Dunphy from the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Rob Goodwin from Perkins + Will.

Marlon Blackwell presents to the jury, [backs to camera] left to right: Ronan Dunphy, Fernanda Patino Espinosa, Jeremy Melvin, Mario Cucinella, Rob Goodwin off camera to the left

The jury discussed several possible winners, but Lorcan O’Herlihy’s Isla Intersections Supportive Housing and Paseo In Los Angeles won out over the highly commended CBMAA Campus Parking for the Crystal Bridges Art Museum in Bentonville Arkansas by Marlon Blackwell. Isla Intersections comprises 54 small, low-cost homes on a difficult site defined by the interchanges between the 105 and 110 freeways, one of several such sites the City of Los Angeles has made available to affordable housing development. The jury praised the way the design makes a congenial living environment in an unappealing area, massing the buildings subtly to create a public paseo which includes several retail units.

It was a fitting winner for the prize, coinciding with WAF’s first excursion to the US.