When the World Architecture Festival (WAF) returned to Singapore after a nine-year absence—after it went back to Europe—Australia won a good share of the awards.
While I personally attended the three-day event (6-8 November) to get the lowdown, inside and out, of the latest in building design and construction, I also met up with well-known Queensland architect and educator Mark Thomson – Director of Eco Effective Solutions – who I hadn’t seen for many a year.
As a WAF regular and an awards judge again this year, he was happy to share his thoughts on the event—winners and losers—and also tell me what he thought of some of the green buildings he visited while in the Singapore urban jungle.
He was quick to tell me his first port of call – even before WAF had started – was to inspect the amazing Mass Engineered Timber (MET) monastery at Bright Hill, which was the work of Kevin Hill and his team at Venturer Timberwork and featured in Wood Central.
Besides that, he was happy to share his three key insights from WAF 2024:
- Australian architecture is “punching above its weight” internationally, acknowledging that Australian projects won approximately 15% of the prizes in this year’s WAF awards program. As one of the judges, he should know. Click here for a full list of 2024 award winners.
- One of the keynote presentations articulated the challenge for architects to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) and warned them not to wait but to dive into the opportunities and benefits from such technologies, which contribute to our rapidly changing society.
- Low-carbon materials and net-zero buildings were positively impacting many advanced developed markets. Despite worldwide political changes, reducing greenhouse emissions and addressing the changing climate are global priorities.
We also discussed as you would expect, seeing I was wearing a Wood Central media hat at the time, the presence or otherwise of wood in the minds and designs of architects the world over.
Mark felt that among the winning entries at WAF, there was a notable increase in timber use, particularly in building interiors, and seemingly to capture the biophilic benefits of natural material usage.
While timber didn’t make its presence felt so obviously in the displays and presentations at WAF, I did talk to quite a few of the exhibitors and sponsors – like Grohe, Rockwool, Figueras and ORO Editions – to discover where wood crops up.
Grohe, the main WAF sponsor for many years, showed me that despite being known as one of the world’s leading producers of water-efficient bathroom/laundry/toilet fixtures—mostly made from metals and plastic—it does ensure that wood features in the interior designs surrounding its products.
In the very comfortable Grohe lounge at WAF, I interviewed Kah Soon Au, Leader, Brand and Communications for Asia Pacific for LIXIL International – the owner of the Grohe brand – who revealed to me a new product line from the Japanese-owned company.
He told me all about “revia”, which combines plastic waste and wood waste to create a material suitable for a wide range of applications. He explains that this product brings “a new value to plastics”. Called “revia pave,” it is a paving material for sidewalks, plazas, parks and building exteriors, which has been available in Japan since January last year.
Utilizing plastic and wood waste to create one ton of “revia” – which would otherwise have been incinerated after use – can result in an 82% reduction in CO₂ emissions. The material can also be recycled and/or collected to become a “revia” product. More on “revia” here.
Besides this notable product introduction, I was also pleased to witness Drs Kristof Crolia and Garvin Goepel’s presentation on their amazingly innovative and award-winning bamboo building design.
MemutAR is actually a design research exhibition project featuring an elegant bamboo pavilion nested next to a beautiful little lake at a University Campus in Hsinchu, Taiwan.
The two architects told the assembled audience at the associated World Festival of Interiors 2024 forum that their design demonstrates that the limited global availability of specialised bamboo artisanry can be overcome through “strategic incorporation in the design and construction process of parametric design tools, Augmented Reality (AR) technology, and global distribution networks.”
MemutAR is built from 29 large, treated, golden-brown-coloured Petung Bamboo culms (Dendrocalamus Asper) that twist together to form a tilted hyperbolic paraboloid geometry.
This shape is trimmed by edge beams made from glue-laminated split Petung Halus bamboo.
The tectonic system is turned into a gridshell by anchoring the culms using a cross-directional series of treated, split, black-coloured Petung splits.
The structure is covered by a tailormade, white, translucent, glass fibre-reinforced polymer membrane.
After I met and talked to the two Hong Kong-based “bamboo design doctors,” they gave me further insight into how MemutAR was prefabricated by highly specialised Balinese artisans and reassembled in Taiwan by a standard local contractor.
AR technology was used throughout to holographically guide in-situ actions. This combination of limited local and overseas specialised skills enabled the straightforward construction of a non-standard space and geometry.
MemutAR also shows that the use of high-end bamboo skills, currently concentrated in only a few highly specialised places globally, can be scaled up and exported overseas with ease, thanks to the convenience of prefabricated parts shipped directly to local building contractors.
With this proof of concept in place, the technology can now be applied not only to geometrically-complex feature projects, but also standard buildings, like small houses built at low cost by local communities.
As the Laboratory for Explorative Architecture and Design Ltd, Hong Kong, Drs Crolia and Goepel won the WAF Completed Buildings (Display) prize for 2024. More details on the winning MemutAR design are here.
Another example of how architects can make much better use of bamboo, regarded as the most sustainable material in the world for buildings, reminding me of the story I did for Wood Central: Bamboo Masterpiece: The Grass Growing Fast on Wood and Steel! In September.
