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LIXIL Celebrates Architecture and Design Industry Excellence at World Architecture Festival 2023

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LIXIL, maker of water and housing products, through its GROHE power brand, was pleased to support the World Architecture Festival 2023 (WAF) for its sixteenth edition at the iconic Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. The WAF is the largest global gathering of the industry’s leading architects and designers (A&D), thought leadership and celebration of their prestigious achievements.

 

WAF also represented a global platform for branding, business networking and opportunities. Nearly 2,000 delegates attended the WAF and INSIDE events and over 800 entries vied for coveted awards across different categories. Out of the 55 category and special award winners, 24 were from Asia and Australasia, led by Australia (10), China (6), and equivalently placed Thailand, India and Japan (2 each).

 

This year’s festival theme ‘Catalyst’ marked WAF’s return to Asia, after a hiatus of almost a decade. The theme explored how architecture and design can be catalysts for beneficial change through enabling, accelerating and inspiring interaction across the entire built environment, to benefit both individuals and institutions. The global A&D community gathered to advance this theme through various WAF keynotes, speakers, and conversations to catalyze ideas and opportunities.

 

GROHE, a global brand for complete bathroom solutions and kitchen fittings, has supported WAF since the inception of the festival in 2008. As WAF Founding Partner, GROHE represents the unique role water plays in the design discipline and helps shape innovative architectural visions and solutions around the element of water.

 

GROHE affirmed this commitment with the sponsorship and awarding of the GROHE Water Prize at WAF to UArchitects. The winning proposal calls for the scaling up of ‘micro-colonies’ comprised of floating platforms in Bangladesh. The connected platforms allow for the growing of food, with a community hub created to provide services (such as education and storage) to clusters of family homes.

 

Clean water production is of great importance for these micro-colonies, which are intended to cope with extreme weather events, combat poverty and provide a new model of how communities can address the challenges of climate change. This is the fifth time the GROHE Water Prize has been awarded, with past winners across water filtration, generation and cooling systems in Peru, Brazil and Greece.

 

Satoshi Konagai, Leader, LIXIL Water Technology, Asia Pacific, expressed, “Through our GROHE power brand, we are proud to be the Founding Partner of the World Architecture Festival since its 2008 inception. Over the past sixteen years, we have worked together to grow WAF into a respected global platform that attracts thousands of delegates to celebrate excellence, network and explore business opportunities over the course of the festival. We are delighted to congratulate the WAF award winners, the GROHE Water Prize winner and WAF shortlist candidates. LIXIL will continue to engage the A&D community to uplift industry excellence and address challenges, including macrotrends across health and wellbeing, sustainability and urbanisation.”

 

“This year’s festival is especially meaningful as we are concurrently launching GROHE SPA for the Asia Pacific region. First launched at this year’s Milan Design Week, we are excited to bring GROHE SPA’s specially curated collections that can create versatile combinations for a multi-sensory, personalised showering experience. We look forward to collaborating with discerning homeowners and industry partners on unique GROHE SPA projects across the region.” Mr. Konagai added.

 

Paul Finch, Programme Director, WAF, said, “Congratulations to all the WAF and INSIDE award winners and shortlist candidates. Their ideas and projects are a beacon for how design can be a multi-faceted catalyst for positive change. Our return to Asia is immensely gratifying to ignite fresh ideas and relationships in and around the A&D community. We greatly appreciate the support and encouragement from GROHE, our sponsors, partners, delegates and the global A&D community.”

 

Ahead of the WAF main event in Singapore, the GROHE and WAF teams worked closely to strengthen industry engagement through a series of special pre-WAF events and receptions held in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines that was enthusiastically received by the A&D community and media in each country.

 

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World Architecture Festival 2023 Shortlist Reveals Most Inspiring Projects

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The most inspiring architectural projects from around the world were recently revealed as the shortlist for the 2023 World Architecture Festival (WAF) was announced. This is ahead of the live event, which will take place in Singapore at Marina Bay Sands from 29 November to 1 December 2023. WAF represents the world’s biggest live-judged architectural awards programme, where all finalists present their projects to a panel of judges at the international festival. Today’s shortlist celebrates the best newly completed buildings and landscapes, as well as the most inspiring future architectural concepts across 33 categories, ranging from residential and cultural to creative reuse.

 

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The Inside World Festival of Interiors shortlist was announced during the week of 13 July 2023. WAF’s sister awards programme celebrates the finest examples of global interior design, across eleven categories. The shortlist has been selected from more than 800 entries and comprises 495 projects from 333 unique practices. This year’s finalists range from major world architects including Foster + Partners, UNStudio, Grimshaw Architects, MAD Architects, WilkinsonEyre, Safdie Architects and Nikken Sekkei, while many smaller practices will also be on stage, live pitching against the big names.

 

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The international judging panel for this year’s awards consists of more than 140 industry experts, representing 43 countries, and will include Lily Jencks, Nigel Coates, Rafiq Azam, Albert Williamson-Taylor, Tracy Meller, Jason Bruges, Annette Fisher, Roland Schnizer and Issa Diabaté. This year’s finalists span the globe, with the top ten shortlisted countries including China, Australia, the United Kingdom, India, the United States, Iran, Thailand, Singapore, Canada, and Japan.

 

On the final day of the festival, category winners from across all 44 category prizes will go head-to-head for the ultimate accolades of World Building of the Year, Landscape of the Year, Future Project of the Year and Interior of the Year. A host of special prizes, including WAFX, which celebrates imaginative cutting-edge designs addressing major world issues, will also be awarded to projects from the main shortlist.

 

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WAF programme director Paul Finch comments: “We are delighted with both the quantity and quality of this year’s entries. They are a reminder in a world experiencing numerous crises that architects continue to address both everyday and unusual challenges with skill and imagination. We look forward to seeing the shortlisted architects in Singapore.”

 

WAF and its co-located event, InsideWorld Festival of Interiors, will welcome the world’s leading architects and designers for three days of talks programmes, awards, exhibitions and fringe events, showcasing leading international practices, the best new projects, and most pressing live debates.

 

Click here to read more about the 2023 World Architecture Festival, or click here for the full shortlist for this year’s completed buildings, future and landscape project awards.

GROHE is Founding Sponsor of the World Architecture Festival, 2021

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The digital edition of the 2021 World Architecture Festival (WAF) took place with the theme “Resetting the city” from 30 November till 3 December 2021

Supporting architects and designers around the world to create healthier urban landscapes during and beyond the pandemic, GROHE is proud to be the main sponsor of the World Architecture Festival (WAF) 2021, a role taken on by the brand upon the inception of the festival in 2008. As a founding partner, GROHE, a leading global brand for complete bathroom solutions and kitchen fittings, represents the unique role water plays in the design discipline and helps shape innovative architectural visions and solutions around the element of water. During the challenging times of the past years, GROHE has continued to support the architect community by sponsoring this year’s WAF and the Water Research Prize 2021.

Greener, cleaner cities

The festival’s theme was“Resetting the City”. Ecological concerns regarding city planning, biodiversity and sustainability now meet the overall need to create healthier, safer surroundings more than ever. As concepts for sourcing clean energy, reducing pollution, and clean water supplies are now directly linked to the control of pandemics, they are becoming the centre of urban planning strategies across the globe, and have also become the focus of this year’s festival. A total of 320 hours of inspiring keynotes, sessions, and panel discussions were presented to the WAF community. As a highlight of this year’s festival, architects from all over the world came together to compete with one another to win “The World Building of the Year”, an award which was unveiled by GROHE on 3 December 2021 as the grand finale.

Inspired by nature – a win to fight global water scarcity

In this context, GROHE awarded the annual Water Research Prize again to projects aiming to find creative solutions for water in the built environment. Out of 53 winners awarded this year, 22 were from Asia. China led the way with 11 wins, the most amount of winners, followed by 7 from Australia and 1 each from India, New Zealand, Singapore, and Vietnam.

The Water Research Prize has been part of the World Architecture Festival since 2017 when the WAF X Manifesto was first published. The manifesto identified the most important challenges for architects within the next ten years, including water in relation to the built environment. With this year’s festival focusing on improving the quality of life in urban areas through greener, healthier infrastructures, the close connection to water is particularly striking. By sponsoring the award, GROHE has been supporting research in the field of unique architectural challenges around water for the past four years and is proud to continue doing so at this year’s festival.

Click here to discover more about GROHE’s sponsorship and the WAF.