Both festivals have the ambitious aim of bringing together, and more importantly judging, the best in architecture and interiors from around the world. This is no simple task. How do you compare projects from areas as diverse as the Soweto in South Africa to those in Sweden? If we were living in 1960s Britain or 1920s Germany, this would be easy. One would simply ignore the diversity of opinion, practice and culture in favour of our way, the only real way. The organisers, to their credit, sought to get around this by enlisting judges from all over the world.

I spent most of my time at the “Inside” part of the festival. At this point I should probably disclose that my partner Ryan Russell and I had two projects shortlisted that did not win, one in Retail for Crumpler and one in Hospitality for Mister Close. We were part of a shortlist of about 4-6 projects per category, and were judged by a panel of three in an environment that most students of architecture would be very familiar with. These categories were won by JAMESPLUMB for Hostem, a beautifully delicate and considered retail space in London, and Neri and Hu for their well resolved and sophisticated Table No. 1 in Shanghai. This job used recycled timber from within the existing building for the tables, and all seats were designed within the practice.

Standouts for me were the Refuse retail concept from Mexico City by Cadena + Asociados, a retail collaboration between C+A, artists and Mexico’s equivalent of Myer. The concept was entirely built of “found object”, (a polite way of saying “garbage”) and curated in a way that seemed to capture the colour and life of the streets of Mexico City without sterilising it.

Another was the interior of the new International Terminal at Wellington Airport by Studio Pacific Architecture in association with Warren and Mahoney. Dubbed “The Rock,” externally it resembles a giant pair of testicles. The interior however, is a series of dark and moody spaces, skillfully crafted and cave like. It has an almost prehistoric feel to it which is completely unexpected in this context.

Two Projects by Singapore-based and Australian-born Kerry Hill, the State Theatre Centre of Western Australia and the Aman resort in New Delhi round out my favourites. Hill is a master of restraint, using light, materiality and texture to create interior spaces that are deceptively simple, but seem to evolve as the light changes.

All of these projects manipulate space and materials in unexpected ways to create projects that say a lot about their place in the world. They are local, crafted and do not rely on imported furniture and design objects from the established design houses of Europe.

The same cannot be said of the overall winner, The Waterhouse at South Bund in Shanghai by Neri and Hu. This hotel is effectively a stripped back warehouse building, sold on being unique in current Chinese Culture where a scorched earth policy usually applies for contemporary development. The hotel shows a rather sophisticated spatial composition within the 1930s building, although it is filled with the usual suspects, and would not be out of place in Hamburg, Melbourne or London.

The main reception hall is concrete and steel and dominated by the Moooi Paper Chandelier that was also used in the food hall of Melbourne Central. The rooms feature Prouve chairs designed in 1930, and Emeco Navy chairs designed in 1944 that are in many other bars and restaurants all over the world. The composition here is great, and all of these products design classics in their own right, however I just get a sense that we’ve seen it all before. A project judged the best interior in the world should not be a modernist concrete, core ten and plasterboard box filled with a collection of catalogue items used a million times in projects all over the world. This is all the more disappointing in that Neri and Hu are accomplished furniture designers.

This is not pushing design in new directions, it’s pattern book selection. Awards programs are an important part of the design profession, for exposing new ideas and creating a discussion in the community about what actually is good design. However, the final winner in this case probably says more about the difficulty of judging such a diverse range of projects, from an even more diverse set of cultures. Perhaps when the range on offer is so broad, it is natural for us to gravitate towards what we know.

Byron George

Byron George and partner Ryan Russell are directors of Russell & George, a design and architecture practice with offices in Melbourne and Rome.

russellandgeorge.com