WIN Awards 2019: The Winners - Interior categories

Cultural Venues

Bronze: PES-Architects, Fuzhou SCAC, Opera Hall

In the Fuzhou Strait Culture and Arts Centre concert hall, we made extensive use of ceramics to be functionally and aesthetically appropriate whilst using truly Chinese material. Ceramic materials are used in different ways throughout the building interiors and exteriors. Symbolically, ceramics is strongly linked to the overall design concept, based on the Centre’s location by the Taiwan Strait and, historically, in the context of the Maritime Silk Road trade route between China and the rest of the world.

The 1,600-seat opera hall is one of three performance spaces in the Strait Culture and Arts Centre complex.

The opera hall layout is based on the classical horseshoe shape. The curved wall surfaces are clad with ceramic tiles in different shades of warm grey, combining 13 floral motifs to create a continuous 3,000sqm jasmine branch pattern. Acoustically, the auditorium is shaped to optimize the coverage of early lateral reflections towards the audience. Convex and concave curvatures are combined to form a complex wall sculpture that acts as a large and efficient acoustic reflector whilst avoiding undesirable focusing effects due to the curved geometry.

The ceramics interior is complemented by bamboo detailing, another traditionally Chinese material. The railings and selected parts of the walls are clad with CNC-cut solid bamboo. The seats and flooring are also of bamboo.

The acoustic ceiling reflector in the opera hall also functions as the main lighting element and integrates the two central stage lighting bridges. The complex double-curved design was shaped out of acrylic.

Silver: Mario Cucinella Architects, Arcipelago Italia Exhibition

Arcipelago Italia is a temporary exhibition based on architect Mario Cucinella’s curatorial proposal for the Italian Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale. The exhibit focuses on the marginal urban spaces created in the internal territories of Italy running along the Alps, down the Appenine range and into Sardinia. Cucinella’s vision was to bring these liminal areas together and create a collection, or an ‘archipelago’ of stories, landscapes and communities; taking the visitors on a journey and allowing them to understand the issues that these areas are facing as well as their possible solutions. At the heart of the exhibition is an exploration of the past and the present narratives within these territories, leading to an investigation into the future of Italian architecture.

The first space functions as an itinerary for the visitors’ journey; eight giant ‘books’ made of wooden panels replace traditional printed guide showing the areas investigated in Cucinella’s research. The landscape prints, illuminated by LED lights from the back, provide the audience with an immersive lighting experience.

The second space is designed as a wide, open area with five large, cedar wood tables joined together like a puzzle in the middle of the room. These five experimental projects physically illustrate the concept of ‘Arcipelago Italia’.

The exhibition continues outside the pavilion with a circular precast concrete bench and a series of panels celebrating the legacy of the Italian architect Giancarlo De Carlo. This serene and contemplative space allows the visitors to relax and reflect on their experience.

Gold: The Oval Partnership, Qujiang Creative Cultural Centre

Qujiang Creative Cultural Centre is a state-of-the-art multi-functional theatre that will host a diverse palette of cultural performances, concerts, educational events and exhibitions. It is where social interactions, community engagements, cultural inclusion, local creativity and the collective identity of people in Xi’an can be nurtured and celebrated.

This subterranean gem feels like a found space in the heart of the new urban fabric. Sited in ancient imperial capital Xi’an, China’s eastern departure point for the Silk Road, the Cultural Centre will form part of an integrated master plan designed by the Oval Partnership. The venue – hailed as Xi’an’s first-of-its-kind creative cultural park – will be rooted in the communities it is surrounded by, putting people at the heart of its foundation and forming one of the city’s key civic backbones feeding into a vibrant mix of uses. The architect’s vision is to create a legible connection between multi-cultural activities within the heart of a new urban district, providing a sustainable framework to inspire the new generation of innovative and creative pioneers converging around Xi’an.

The design responds to the local context, introducing elements and materials that evoke a modern re-interpretation of Chinese architectural repertoires and traditions that characterize the Xi’an region. This design vocabulary is seamlessly embodied throughout all spaces, from the city scale down to the smallest of human scales.

Learning

Bronze: Zest Art, Carp Joy Club

As the first kids club in Xiamen, it is located in the Jimei New Town. Occupying an area over 1,000sqm, the Club is completed in October. 2018, adding to the educational resources of Jimei New Town. It is designed according to the advanced educational ideas and the characteristics of children, trying to provide colorful spaces for learning and growing.

The design draws inspiration from the fish of Ancient Mythology The Classic of Mountains and Seas, creating lively and natural scenes in the book bar, the robot room, the piano room, the kids’ theatre… A series of fresh and lively settings form an educational space for both parents and children, which arouses their interests and happiness.

The project has the biggest community library, known as the book bar of the Club, with a collection of 2,000 books. Fish-shaped decorations hanging from the ceiling, creating a lively space together with the bubble lamps and the waves on the wall. It will not only arouse children’s interest but also remind adults of their childhood dreams.

Different colors including green, blue and yellow are employed to create a series of symbolic images such as the sun, the clouds, the hills, the forest and the singing birds.

The design is full of love and romance, creating an experience space which will not only inspire the imagination and curiosity but also encourage people to pursue a happy life.

Silver: Maden Group, American School of Kosovo

Being a kid and even a teenager is definitely a special feeling, a feeling of being without any worries. The enthusiasm for our children to have better conditions for education, where they want with desire to go to campus, has been the main motive to create a positive and energetic environment. The school now accept teaching is a game, entertainment and anything else, factors that make the learning more attractive.

Multifunctional space where multipurposes are developed in one place, natural lighting in each space, variety of colors and incorporating of green in the interior are some of the components that characterize the new campus of the American School of Kosovo. The yard is enriched with circular oases, which in some cases are green and in some cases filled with children's games, all interconnected. Also, enriched with multipurpose amphitheater, open terrain for various sports and closed terrain. These include an area of 2,670sqm, so giving the name Campus.

Gold: Mecanoo, LocHal Library

The LocHal brings together learning and studying, business and research, meeting, creating and innovating, exhibiting and presenting in an iconic former locomotive shed in the heart of Tilburg’s new City Campus. The 1932 building, originally belonging to the Dutch Railways, now contains the Midden-Brabant Library, Kunstloc Brabant, and Seats2meet. The conversion of the monumental building is a collaborative achievement: CIVIC architects, Braaksma & Roos and Inside Outside carried out the architectural design, the renovation and the textiles and Mecanoo was responsible for the 7000sqm interior design including 1,300sqm of offices.

Mecanoo’s design gives the interior a unique industrial character by combining new features and old industrial elements. The eye-catcher is the city café featuring a bar with red, brown and gold ceramic tiles and a neon LocHal logo on top. Large oak tables move along the original railway tracks and can be combined to function as a stage, with the grand staircases as an auditorium. These stairs have flexible oak seating elements with which people can ‘build’ their own meeting place or quiet working niche. LocHal has several themed rooms for specialized work, research, learning and collaboration, each with its own design and atmosphere. The children’s library is inspired by the immersive fairy tale environments of the nearby Efteling theme park with playful furniture which encourages children to read, imagine and dream.

The ambition of the municipality to give the Lochal back to the people has been achieved: it has truly become Tilburg’s new living room.

Experiential Design

Bronze: S.U.N Design, Shenzhen-Hong Kong International Center

We are using interior design language to tell a story about the unfolded scroll painting.The overall design is an art museum space with the function of sales center. By adopting a pure space design method, we are trying to express the theme, art and story of the space. In the simple space, you will witness an interesting fusion of art, modern, technology, future, the orient and culture. From the architectural facade, the landscape of scroll paintings made of glaze glass climbs in a spiral to the top of the building to make a skylight window. It is a window where interior talks to the exterior also where the scroll painting extended from exterior to interior. In the interior space, we reinterpret the scroll painting and make it into a huge sculpture going through the whole space. Furthermore, we make the landscape from the painting as a concept of different spaces which transform “landscape in the scroll painting” (architecture) to “scroll painting in the landscape” (interior).

Silver: Das Design Co, Mountain without boundaries | Macalline Qinghuahai Park

If we say that the living room is warm and comfortable, then the marketing space must be a sorghum and bright. The large area of the space is spread with neutral colors, dim lighting, quiet high-grade gray, calm emerald green, and full-featured metallic color. It is also echoing the attention of the oriental rhyme.

Gold: Studio Illumine (lighting design), Nike House of Innovation 001

Nike unveiled the first House of Innovation, a new global store concept in Shanghai. The 4000sqm space is spread over four floors and portrays Nike’s biggest innovation moments, matched with a personalised and digitally connected retail experience.

The store interior was inspired by the fluidity of sport, created to ignite the next evolution of Nike retail through transformative displays and interactive journeys. Working with the Nike Design team in both Shanghai and Portland, the team from Studio Illumine helped enhance the experience by limiting light to only where truly necessary. The intent was to create strong lighting contrasts between circulation and display areas, producing a visually dramatic space. Deep-set, track-mounted narrow-beam and framing projectors supplemented with wall-washers are the main sources of lighting within the space. With light fixtures discretely concealed and tucked away between baffles and screens, the lighting effect is seen and felt. This dramatic lighting effect makes the retail space feel more like a museum than a sporting goods store.

The Nike Arena, a sunken central space visible from all four floors, is a digitally-enabled ‘center court’ cladded with LED screens. Through the use of remote-controlled stage projectors, mounted on both the floor scrims and high ceiling above, this space doubles up as an interactive digital-led sports trial, workshop and retail space.

On the store exterior facade, the Nike-exclusive slumped glass, together with the lighting from the interiors, creates visual motion that mirrors the movement of athletes and represents the iconic aesthetic of Nike Air.

Branding & Wayfinding

Bronze: 9 Studio Design Group, Urban Enframement

Our proprietors have planned to build a boutique and hotel style apartment building as a landmark in the Xinyi Planning District, the most central metropolitan area in Taipei City. As the sales office is located in old buildings in row that are waiting to be renovated, an unimaginable visual image is created to amplify the conflicts of the transition from the old to the new.

This project includes two stores in the curbside, with the sales office on the right and the model house on the left. A large advertising billboard in the facade above the second floor is imagined to be an urban display window that can attract people’s eyes to this unique building at first glance.

The two stores are designed with the concept of two boutique display windows. A model of the property project is placed in the display window of the sales office on the right-hand side, which achieves the visual effect that a house is placed in the shop window of a boutique. The shop window of the model house on the left-hand side is arranged with a special image: as all houses are fully decorated and furnished for the future owners, all things needed in life are painted white and a red suitcase is put in the middle of the shop window, which, on the one hand, strengths the sales strategies, and one the other hand, makes an image of selling branded clothes as a boutique’s shop window.

Silver: Gensler, Your Space

To mark the 25th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence’s tragic death, the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust (SLCT) embarked upon an exciting new venture; transforming its centre in Deptford into a creative co-working hub.

Our brand design studio was briefed to create a wayfinding and environmental graphics solution that was sympathetic to the centre’s legacy, whilst embracing its future, creating a motivating setting which fosters networking, development and collaboration among emerging architects, designers and creatives.

We wanted our solution to honour Stephen’s own architectural ambitions. Given the pro bono nature of the project, we had to work within very tight budget constraints but were equally given a lot of freedom to be creative.

Rather than going down the instructive route, as wayfinding often can, our team wanted to create a language that was restrained, conversant, inspiring and fun. To entice people to the various different spaces and create a sense of familiarity, various surfaces such as concrete floors and glazed partitions have been enlivened and embellished with laminate vinyl ciphers of their corresponding architectural and technical drawing symbols – speaking to the building’s users in a language they appreciate and understand.

It's humorous for anyone who sees these environmental graphics and architectural elevations because they’re out of scale and out of context, which adds an element of playfulness and works well with the character of the interior. The project has helped us, as designers, to think innovatively about the way we approach buildings and the way they speak to their users.

Gold: Populous, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium

The wayfinding and branding at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium responds to the myriad needs of event organisers and imbues the building with a sense of history and prestige, creating a venue that fans, players and staff can all identify with as ‘home’.

The wayfinding system combines variable digital signage with traditional signboards to allow stadium operators a significant degree of flexibility, enabling event-specific information to be displayed and last minute changes or messages to be quickly programmed in.

By echoing key aspects of the building’s architecture, such as perforations in the façade cladding, the signboard family forms a unifying aspect to the design, a ‘golden thread’ that runs from the exterior of the stadium through to the interior spaces.

The elegant typography, clear messaging and custom pictography communicates information in a manner that can be easily understood by all, using colours and a typeface that reinforce the Tottenham Hotspur brand.

Around the stadium, the design team has embedded key elements of Tottenham Hotspur’s branding into the fabric of the building, celebrating the club’s heritage and reinforcing a sense of place for fans.