The World Architecture Festival (WAF) will feature for the first time a ‘Wood Excellence Prize’ at this year’s WAF awards programme set to be held in Singapore later this year.

Sponsored by the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), any type of project can be entered; the only criterion is that wood is an integral part of the project, a statement said.

Entry into the prize is free and if shortlisted, the designers or architects responsible will be invited to present their project to the prize judges live at the festival. The winner will be announced at the WAF awards ceremony on October 3. Architect, designer and a champion of wood in architecture, Matteo Thun, will chair the jury for the Wood Excellence Prize.

"Wood, as a renewable resource material, is indispensable in architecture and design. Our daily challenge is to achieve projects and products that are sustainable, of timeless beauty, pure and simple, but at the same time technically and environmentally innovative. The new Wood Excellence Prize will reinforce this intention and I am very pleased to be involved in this very prestigious event,” said Thun.

The WAF awards sit at the heart of the festival, and will see practices from around the world compete across 28 individual award categories for global recognition. Competing across three category groups of completed buildings, landscape projects and future projects, previous WAF award entrants have ranged from renowned global architectural firms to small local practices.

Architects of every shortlisted project are invited to attend the festival to give a live presentation to a panel of judges, asserting their case for why their project should win. The winners of each category are put forward to compete for the coveted World Building of the Year award, presided over by the festival’s ‘super-jury’, with the presentation of the award being the culmination of WAF 2014.

Roderick Wiles, AHEC director for Africa, Middle East, South Asia and Oceania, said: “AHEC runs one of the most widely recognized wood promotion campaigns in the world and it makes perfect sense for us to be collaborating with the World Architecture Festival in creating a new award for design excellence in this most versatile and sustainable of materials. Today, great strides are being made in wood technology, but it is the creativity and inspiration of the international design community that will ensure wood realizes its full potential.”

The World Architecture Festival is the largest annual festival and live awards programme for the global architecture community, and is set to take place at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore from October 1 to 3. – TradeArabia News Service