Following our RIAI Award win in 2024 for Living in a Landscape, the project was shortlisted for the World Architecture Festival (WAF), held at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.
We arrived on Tuesday ahead of three packed days of presentations, talks and events, culminating in the Friday night gala dinner. Practices from across the world — including AHMM, Stanton Williams and Takaharu + Yui Tezuka, unmistakable in their trademark blue and red — had gathered in one place to present shortlisted projects to live juries and audiences.
When we weren’t presenting, we spent much of the festival sitting in on sessions and speaking with architects about their work, the challenges behind their projects and the different contexts in which they practise. The presentations covered an impressive range of places, scales and building types: from the beautiful renovation of an old pumphouse in Winnipeg, to a star observatory in Cyprus and community housing in Melbourne by Clare Cousins. Seeing such different projects presented alongside one another was one of the most valuable parts of the festival.
Outside the festival, Singapore itself was as much a part of the trip. The city’s relationship with landscape is difficult to miss; greenery seems to occupy every available surface, woven through streets, buildings and infrastructure. A visit to the Singapore Botanic Gardens gave us a chance to experience this at a different scale and see just how integral planting and landscape are to the character of the city.
The evenings were mostly spent exploring the city and eating with people we had met during the day, often ending up at Lau Pa Sat hawker centre. Mark also reconnected with an old college friend from Singapore, who took us beyond the obvious stops and gave us a local perspective on the city, its history and how it has developed since independence in 1965.
As with most events of this kind, some of the most useful conversations happened away from the formal programme. We enjoyed spending time with architects from BDP, Ström Architects, Stanton Williams, Cox and Broadway Malyan, exchanging experiences and talking about projects well beyond those being presented at WAF.
There was also a Belfast connection to celebrate. Broadway Malyan sponsored the student award, which was won by a group from Queen’s University Belfast where we teach — a great result for the students and our colleagues to see while halfway around the world.
A few days in Singapore gave us the chance to present Living in a Landscape alongside work from practices across the world, experience a city where architecture and landscape are closely intertwined, and meet people whose work and ideas we’ll take away with us.
