Iwan Baan/world architecture festival
Aptly named, the complex features 31 apartment blocks which "interlace" or cross over each other diagonally. The structures are stacked one on top of the other. Buro Ole Scheeren partner Eric Chang said the firm wanted to conceptualize the design as more of a village: "It's a large scale project -- it's 170,000 sqm and accommodates 1,040 units. So we were thinking, how can we build more for a vertical village rather than a building for housing. In our design, there's multiple opportunities for social connectivity, a real sense of community, the presence of nature, and generous space."
Besides winning the overall World Building of the Year, the development was also the category winner of Completed Housing.

Scroll through the gallery to see the other category winners.
world architecture festival
The design was described by judges as a demonstration of "how architecture can successfully transform residual urban spaces by taking advantage of the air rights above." The Vancouver House creates a residential option in an area that is connected to an overpass. Bjarke Ingells Group (BIG) Partner Kai-Uwe Bergmann explains: "In most cities the prime sites have been taken and built, and what we now have is these leftover spaces. This project is a model for how other cities might use these spaces." The design won for overall Future Project of the Year and for its category, Future Residential.
©MYAA
The Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies is built up of educational spaces as well as a mosque. The building is detailed with Islamic calligraphy and verses from the Qur'an throughout the structure.
world architecture festival
A community center based in Hoi An, Vietnam, this structure was designed specifically for the surrounding local community. It features a roof made of bamboo and coconut leaves, which is designed to direct rainwater towards the site's greenery.
James Ewing/world architecture festival
New York's Fulton Center is designed to connect 11 subway lines and up to 30,000 daily commuters. It also holds a large atrium in the center of the structure which features a glass dome and allows for natural light to pass throughout the building.
world architecture festival
Offering an alternative view of the garden within it, the design separates the bottom garden floor from the upper observation floor using a bouncing rope canopy. Visitors can climb up to the rope canopy and observe the garden through the rope floor.
Peter Bennetts/world architecture festival
The Walumba Elders Centre project was commissioned in response to a devastating flood which destroyed the previous health center. The new structure sits 3 meters above the ground to ensure that it is above flood level.
world architecture festival
A higher learning music school based in Tokyo, the Toho Gakuen School of Music was originally founded in 1948. It is lined with oak in order to enhance acoustics in the building.
world architecture festival
Described as a health resort, the Lanserhof Lake Tegern features 70 rooms, each designed to be little houses. The structure offers both hotel facilities and medical care.
QuangTran/world architecture festival
a21 Studio is an architecture firm based in Vietnam. It previously took home the World Building of the Year award in 2014. This year, they received recognition in the Completed House category. It's a narrow home designed to house a family of seven. The structure does not follow a standard format of floors and rooms, and instead is built of individual dwellings that are suspended alongside each other.
Brett Boardman Photography/world architecture festival
A collection of curved blocks, this mixed-use building is home to offices and shopping areas as well as apartments. It features commercial areas on the lower floors, while homes are on the upper floors.
world architecture festival
The Courtyard House Plug-in is a way of renovating historic courtyard houses in Beijing, without tearing anything down. It's a prefabricated modular structure that is built inside the original structures.
KENGOSHIMA/world architecture festival
Described by the judges as a "magical, habitable, almost invisible structure," the HIGO office is located in an earthquake zone in Hokkaido. The windows are fitted to create horizontal strip patterns across the structure.
Sergey Louks/world architecture festival
The Ballet School was created between two existing structures: a cinema and a neighboring home. The structure is finished with translucent glass throughout -- these are used as partitions but also to maximize natural light within the building.
Aitor Ortiz
The stadium was designed to replace the previous San Mames stadium, which was over 100 years old and home to the Athletic Bilbao football club. The old structure was previously regarded as the "cathedral" by fans, and this new stadium had to respect the heritage of its predecessor.
HEZHENHUAN/world architecture festival
This shopping complex is based around an ancient temple in Chengdu, the capital of China's Sichuan province. The complex pays tribute to the past by borrowing design cues from traditional hutongs, or the city's historic alleyways.
world architecture festival
The Reservoir project is currently being built. It features an office complex which surrounds an existing body of water. The building borrows design cues from ancient Indian stepwells. The office building, like the stepwells, is designed to collect rainwater to fill the well.
world architecture festival
A collaborative project between London-based Serie Architects, and Singapore firm, Multiply Architects, the Neighbourhood Centre and Polyclinic is set to become a new center for public events. It will feature healthcare facilities, gardens, gym spaces, dining spaces, retail locations and more.
world architecture festival
Described by the judges as having a "poetic relationship between the planned spaces and the existing building and landscape," the education building fits into a slope in order to minimally affect its forest surroundings.
world architecture festival
Designed to be as domestic and homey as possible, the HDR Rice Daubney project Al Maha Centre for Children and Young Adults is described as a "non-institutional and non-intimidating setting."
world architecture festival
Described as a "culturally, socially and environmentally friendly sustainable project" by the judges, the Home Farm is a concept for urban retirement housing. It incorporates vertical urban farming, which could have direct, positive effects on Singapore's food security.
world architecture festival
The ISSA Grotto/Hill House is built on a steep hill on the Vis island in Greece. As there was little usable space on the hill to build a home, the architects had to carve into the hill, pulling design inspiration from caves and grottoes.
world architecture festival
The Cukurova Airport is designed by Turkey-based EAA Emre Arolat Architects. The environmentally conscious airport design is also created to best give visitors a positive first impression of the city that are visiting.
world architecture festival
The second win for the EAA Emre Arolat Architects is their Museum of Painting and Sculpture concept. This project is based in Turkey.
world architecture festival
Described as "sustainable and efficient" yet also respectful of London's existing heritage, the London Olympic Stadium Transformation project by Populous was announced as the winner for future Leisure-led development projects.
world architecture festival
St Petersburg-based architects Studio 44 won a local competition for their proposed redevelopment plans for the historic center of Kaliningrad, in Russia. The architect's investigated each of the city's 12 distinct districts, and proposed developments for each area individually.
Singapore CNN  — 

If you want to understand what the city of the future might look like, a good place to start would be this week’s World Architecture Festival (WAF).

In the exhibition hall of Singapore’s glitzy Marina Bay Sands resort, over 2,000 architects from the world’s top firms and emerging practices have gathered together to present their designs, ranging from the incredible (buildings that float atop the ocean), to the outlandish, (a skyscraper made from bamboo).

But the festival is more than just an exhibition showcase, it’s also a chance for the industry to recognize the very best in architectural design.

WAF
Firms present and defend their designs to jurors, in front of a live audience

Throughout the three day event, competing architects present their ideas in 20-minute blocks in front of a live audience, in the hopes of impressing a panel of expert jurors. The process, as WAF program director Paul Finch puts it, is somewhat reminiscent of a dog show.

“It’s the best in breed and the best in show,” says Finch, referring to the 31 competition categories and 338 entries.

“On the final day of the festival, all the category winners, present again to ‘super jurors’ – the great and good of the architecture and design world. From that we get the World Building of the Year, the Future Project of the Year, the Interior Design of the Year, and the Landscape of the Year. The very best of the best.”

World Building of the Year

This year’s top honor, the coveted ‘World Building of the Year’ was awarded to the Interlace – an ambitious residential development in Singapore – by Netherlands-based OMA and Buro Ole Scheeren from Germany.

The mixed-use structure is located within a green belt area of the city-state’s southern ridges, and claims to challenge traditional notions of what it means to live in a modern tropical metropolis.

world architecture festival
The Interlace has been crowned the World Building of the Year 2015. Designed by OMA and Buro Ole Scheeren, is described as "one of the most ambitious residential developments" in the tropical island-state's history.
Courtesy World Architecture Festival
Although it's also called a "vertical village," the Interlace stretches horizontally with 31 apartment blocks, each six stories tall and 70 meters long. Such design is seen as a radical move away from the "clusters of isolated towers" that is typical of housing in the region.
Courtesy World Architecture Festival
Though set in Singapore -- a highly-planned city-state -- the Interlace envisions itself as a "intricate network of living and social spaces intertwined with the natural environment."
world architecture festival
Stacked in hexagonal arrangements around open courtyards, the scheme strives to create a "network of internal and external environments," mixing shared and private outdoor spaces on multiple layers.
world architecture festival
The project beat other category winners announced earlier at the festival, including a bamboo community center in Vietnam and a dome-shaped transport hub and retail space in Manhattan.
world architecture festival
World Architecture Festival Director Paul Finch praised the project as a trailblazer, saying it "presents an alternative way of thinking about developments which might otherwise become generic tower clusters."
Courtesy World Architecture Festival
The Interlace is the eighth project to claim the illustrious title of World Building of the Year since the competition's inception in 2008. The festival has been held in Singapore for the past four years and will move to Berlin in 2016.

Rather than building upwards – as is so often the case – the Interlace (as its name would suggest) expands outwards, through an expansive interconnected hexagonal lattice of apartment spaces that are integrated with the natural environment.

Buro Ole Scheeren partner Eric Chang said the firm wanted to conceptualize the design as more of a village: “It’s a large scale project – it’s 170,000 square meters and accommodates 1,040 units. So we were thinking: ‘How can we build more for a village rather than for housing?’

“In our design, there’s multiple opportunities for social connectivity, a real sense of community, the presence of nature, and generous space.”

As well as making full use of green and open spaces, with large roof gardens, cascading balconies and expansive shared courtyards, these interlocking blocks incorporate a variety of sustainable features.

“We looked at a lot of mainly passive designs strategies,” says Chang. “We looked at quantifiable analysis on daylight control, solar radiation, wind movements, heat gains, solar exposure, which courtyards would get the most heat gain, and the planning of activities were organized around these factors.”

But the winning result was by no means straightforward, as Professor Sir Peter Cook, the founder of 1960s avant-garde architectural group Archigram, and one of the event’s ‘super jurors’ explains: “It’s very difficult, with so many beautiful, quite worthy projects.”

“I think you look for a power of impact. It’s something you know you’ll remember in two years’ time. It’s a game-changer.”

“So much of architecture is predictable, particularly housing. Another block, another block, another block. But this isn’t ho-hum here we go again.”

Looking to the future

The congregation of the industry’s best and brightest gives a rare chance for architects and designers to share ideas, with this year’s keynote lectures tackling core questions such as the future of height, design, localizing food production, building in extreme climates, and intelligent materials.

Scott Duncan, an architect at Skidmore Ownings and Merrill (SOM), who led a discussion exploring how technology and local height regulations impact on building design, believes the aspiration to build taller is not going away anytime soon.

As part of the team involved in the construction of the 99-story Pertamina Energy Tower in Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, Duncan is something of an expert on the subject.

“Modern cities – especially those in developing economies – understand how an iconic building can define them in the world.”

But Indonesia faces its host of climate change woes, so SOM puts forth this idea: what if, instead of structural considerations, they allowed saving energy to drive the design? Could Jakarta’s skyline be defined by a symbol of renewable energy?

“We have no choice but to confront climate change,” says Duncan. “So our entire building form, and detailing and tech, was all driven by this net zero energy goal – doing a building that didn’t consume anymore energy than it generated on its own.”

That energy source, explains Duncan, will come from local volcanoes. Through the conversion of geothermal energy, the building will be the world’s first self sufficient skyscraper.

Future of Food

Rahel Belatchew of the Swedish urban design practice, Belatchew Aritekter, highlighted an experimental proposal of how urbanites in Stockholm could one day get their food.

Pods of insect farms – because in the future, insects, rather than livestock, will be humanity’s main source of protein, she claims – would be located at traffic intersections. This would reduce our dependence on meat and our need for farmable land.

The scarcity of resources also inspired conversations around materials – and how to become more sustainable.

New, innovative materials

CRG Architects
CRG Architects proposes an ambitious way of using bamboo

Architects, here, are looking to technology and green materials to reduce energy consumption.

Bamboo was recently recognized by the United Nations as a green building material that can help combat climate change.

Carlos Gomez of CRG Architects, proposes using the strength of the material, in skyscraper form. According to Gomez, what if buildings not only reduced their emissions, but actually absorbed CO2?

Bamboo has been used for thousands of years – but Gomez is one of the first to think of it on a larger scale – in the form of a skyscraper.

Optimal conditions

Though many might scoff at the idea – even the more tenuous of concepts are worthy of thought, says festival curator Jeremy Melvin.

That’s just the nature of architecture: “Architects always think about the future, and mostly in an optimistic way. You have to project something that you hope will be better than what exists.”

WAF
The World Architecture Festival in Singapore

But the conditions have to be right.

“To make great architecture, you need space, political will, vision and money,” says Melvin.

Singapore, then, is not only an appropriate place to hold the festival, but an example to the world.

“Singapore is an interesting place for architecture. It has a powerful planning framework, and its been influential on how its grown and the opportunities its given to architects,” says Melvin.

WAF director Paul Finch adds, “Everyone that has been here, is incredibly impressed by the design planning integration that is part of Singapore’s society and part of the Singapore government’s ethos for the past 50 years. Consequences of well planned city traffic, housing and public transport finds a happy mix. There are lessons here for both old and emerging cities on how Singapore has done it.”