I'm Paul Finch, Programme Director and Founder of the World Architecture Festival, and I'm here to talk about what happened last year, and more importantly, what's going to happen in 2013.
In 2012, we moved World Architecture Festival from Barcelona, where we'd spent four happy years, to Asia and specifically to Singapore. Quite a big move for us, but it turned out a great success.
And there was a shot of energy that went through the whole event, I think partly because a lot of people were experiencing for the first time the dynamism of the Asian construction market.
And a sense of, well, this is a place where design counts, things are being built at speed, it's all happening, and we're looking very much forward to repeating the exercise this year.
There was only one venue we felt we could use in moving to Singapore, which is the extraordinary Moshi Safty Marina Bay Sands Complex. This is three sculpted towers with an enormous sky deck, a couple of hundred metres long, bridging the whole of the top.
So you get these spectacular views both out to sea and across Singapore City itself, and that complex includes exhibition and conference venue.
So we were able to conduct pretty much the whole event in one combined space, and people found that very exciting, and Moshi Safty came and gave our first keynote address, which was a great privilege.
We had a very good set of category winners that competed for the big prize, the completed building of the year, the world building of the year, and the World Future Project of the Year.
As far as completed buildings were concerned, it came down to two, really. One was a very beautifully conceived civic project in Spain by Menes Arquitectos, and this took an existing town square with a tiny bit of demolition, they opened up some historic views, and then they provided civic facilities below ground.
The other one was completely different, and ironically was in Singapore itself. Immediately next to Marina Bay Sands, and in the end this one, the big prize, this is the Gardens by the Bay by a British design team, Wilkinsonair Architects, but also environmental engineer, structural engineer and landscape architect, very much part of the team.
And this project is partly landscape, partly building, and partly environmental proposition. On the future project side, a very, very different proposition. The winner was a master plan for a development which is now under construction in Qatar.
This is the heart of Doha project, and this isn't an attempt, instead of doing what usually happens in the Gulf, which is to just have enormous high rise office towers, which have very little relationship to each other, and nothing happening on the ground between the blocks.
This was an attempt to have, on the one hand, a more European style of urbanism, i.e. great concentration on the streets and squares and routes and perimeters and shading, but on the other hand, when one says European, one immediately realised that actually there are traditions in Islamic architecture which also deal with all those things.
So the judges thought that this was the best of the bunch, and an interesting precedent for the Gulf and the Middle East in general, and perhaps for other places that wonder whether the future of all cities is just a kind of series of separated high rise blocks, or whether there are other urbanistic approaches which could give you a richer result.
Thank you for watching.
