World Architecture Festival: What Do You Need to Know About It?

The World Architecture Festival (WAF) is held annually and exists already for more than ten years. This important architectural event for the first time took place in Barcelona, in 2008, and continued to work in this city for the next four years, after which it was moved to Singapore. Since 2016, the location of the World Architectural Festival has changed again. Berlin has become a new venue for it and, since 2018, Amsterdam. Traditionally, WAF goes for three days in fall-time (October or November) or in early winter (December). 

The festival has a rich program in which architects, designers, landscape designers, suppliers of building materials and equipment, customers from many countries take part. The main feature of the WAF is “live” presentations of its participants in front of the jury members, veru much resembling the defense of graduation projects at an architectural institute. 

Any architect (architectural workshop) can apply for participation in the festival, regardless of the level of his (her) “fame”. If the work is pre-selected by a professional jury, it must be later presented to the WAF in a certain category, in the so-called short-list. The categories envisaged by the World Architectural Festival include “future projects” (residential, public, office buildings, commercial projects of mixed use, experimental projects, competitions entries, cultural objects, leisure, infrastructure, healthcare, educational institutions, master plans), “realized buildings ”(residential and public buildings, cultural institutions, exhibition facilities, healthcare facilities, buildings for higher education and research, hotels and leisure facilities, private houses, high-rise buildings, buildings of mixed use, “old and new”, offices, buildings producing and processing energy, religious buildings, schools, commercial, sports institutions, transport, villas), “landscape design” (country, urban). 

 Text: Elizaveta Klepanova
Photos courtesy of World Architecture Festival

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