Benson Radiology, a large private radiology practice in Australia, has won accolades for building an “undulating and enveloping” screen in front of its existing grey, lacklustre suburban property in Salisbury, south Australia.
According to the entry, visitors and passersby are entranced by the building and its inviting archway - “a sensation that is not normally associated with medical facilities”.
With the fins painted blue on one side and white on the other, the building also appears to change colour as one drives past.
Located in Sentosa, Singapore, ‘Diamond House’ sits on a slope that faces a man-made lake.
The geometry is derived from wrestling with the planning parameters imposed on the neighbourhood, with strategically positioned windows that allow in as much light as possible while enabling privacy from neighbouring properties.
The sloping walls at the corners also allow for a smaller footprint while optimising space upstairs.
Janamani Vistor Centre in the Tibetan province of Yushu provides information about Janamani, the world’s largest Tibetan Buddhist Cairn.
The centre also provides local Yushu-ers with a post office, clinic, public toilets and a small research archive.
It was built with local construction techniques, and the stone masonry was done by local masons using the same kind of rock from which Mani stones (Tibetan prayer stones) are carved.
Fazenda Boa Vista is a holiday park in Porto Feliz, southern Brazil. Its spa, which was built to follow the land contours and boundaries of the adjacent woodland, has been shortlisted in the hospitality category.
The underlying element of the project was white - apparently because it inspires “peace, quiet, relaxation and purity”.
Each wall defines a room and is intended to jut out from the roof like “vertical blades”.
This rainbow striped building is Dallas Brooks primary school, located in a north Melbourne suburb in Australia. The local government chose the “ebullient brickwork patterning” to recall the rich patterning of the traditional dresses of the local children’s different ethnic groups, many of whom have recently immigrated to Australia from Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and Sudan.
The profile of the wall was apparently developed by compressing the silhouetted imagery of the surrounding “suburbanfabric” into a new composition.
The school has two sports halls, a commercial kitchen, community gardens, an adult education centre, a pre-school centre, a broadcasting studio, and two rugby pitches.
The Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan, was built as a museum, gallery hall and conference centre to promote the history, language and spiritual values of Azerbaijan to visitors.
All the functions of the centre are supposedly represented by the folds in the surface of the building.
The interior spaces are flooded with natural light via the glass facade.
Is it a spaceship? A transformer? A sci-fi time-machine? No, it’s Starhill Gallery, Kuala Lumpur’s “most iconic shopping mall”, according to its shortlisted entry.
Featuring luxury shops and fine dining restaurants, the building was designed to stand out from the “quick-fix, ubiquitous shopping mall facades” of its neighbours.
A new lightweight facade of glass, steel and stone panels was wrapped around an existing building. It is the first building of its kind in Malaysia to embrace cutting-edge facade technology from the French engineer RFR, the team that delivered the Pyramid at the Paris Louvre.
The new maritime and beachcombers museum - ‘Kaap Skil’ - in the Dutch Wadden island of Texel was built using recycled wooden boards from the North Holland Canal. It is also shortlisted in the ‘culture’ category.
The museum is designed with four “playfully-linked gabled roofs” as a play on the rhythm of the surrounding rooftops. Apparently, if these are seen from the sea, they resemble waves rising out above the dyke.
From within, the glass facade in front of the wooden boards means the boards cast a linear pattern of daylight and shadow.
Inspired by the shape of water in endless motion, Denmark’s new national aquarium ‘The Blue Planet’ is intended to resemble a blue whirlpool from the outside.
Yet from the sky, the building looks entirely white and is shaped like a starfish.
A closer inspection of the facade patterning reveals fish scales and inside, the curved ceilings are apparently reminiscent of the baleens of a large whale.
And last, but by no means least, a British entry! Halley in Antarctica is the most southerly science research station operated by the British Antarctic Survey. It was in an earlier research station built here that scientists first observed the hole in the ozone layer, but occupation became precarious after the previous station flowed too far on the ice to a new position at risk of calving as an iceberg.
So, the British Antarctic Survey ran an international competition to select designers for a new station that is fully relocatable (should the same problem happen again) and allows the station to climb above the annually rising snow levels. The winners, London-based architects Hugh Broughton, were selected for their amazing modular design.
The modules are supported on giant steel skis and hydraulically driven legs that allow the station to mechanically ‘climb’ up out of the snow every year. As the ice shelf moves out towards the ocean, the modules can be lowered and towed by bulldozers further inland.