Keynote speaker Patrik Schumacher, director at Zaha Hadid Architects, stirred up quite an ordeal with his ideas on housing during last year’s World Architecture Festival, which ran November 16-18. The festival, which is a kind of global melting pot for architecture and design professionals, celebrated a theme of Housing for Everyone. It was prompted by a variety of influences—the situation of displaced communities, for one—and brought in a crowd of 2,500 professionals in the sector.
Listen to Schumacher’s speech here.
Off to a reflective start with the opening seminar Housing: a global perspective, held by DASH, Delft Architectural Studies on Housing, TU Delft. Here’s to stating the oncoming problem, “According to the World Urbanization Prospects published by the United Nations in 2014, in the next three decades the global urban population will increase by 2.5 billion.” The seminar kick-started thoughts on how architecture will respond.
Throughout the first day various seminars took place, including one called Temporary housing—refugee response, in which Bernhard Franken, principal at Franken Architekten, and Kilian Kleinschmidt, founder of Innovation and Planning Agency, discussed the long- and short-term needs architects should take into account when designing for refugees and the communities they join.
Matthias Hollwich, principal at Hollwich Kushner (HWKN), later examined the idea of generating new approaches and housing typologies, notably a cradle-to-grave housing choice. As the discovery and invention of new bio-materials and technologies for bio-construction grow, professionals should feel a creative spark here.
Find more on the WAF award winners 2016.
