2012 WAN Award Winners

| October 30, 2012

2012 WAN Urban Regeneration Award Winners from World Architecture News.

The winners of the first ever WAN Urban Regeneration Award can now be revealed. Our esteemed jury panels fought back and forth to select two winners – one for the Completed category, the other Unbuilt – but we can now announce the successful practices of this complex and challenging sector.

The completed category winner is Taylor Cullity Lethlean with their Auckland Waterfront scheme.

The jury was in full agreement about how Auckland’s Wynyard Point redevelopment had successfully transformed a redundant expanse of former industrial waterfront area on the edge of the harbour. “Damn clever!” were Martyn Evans, Creative Director of Cathedral Group summarising comments about the scheme. Kent Jackson, Design Director of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, agreed that it was “a great play on the industrial language”.

The layered mixed-use development has brought a series of new and diverse activities into the working parts of the harbour via a new public realm, woven into the existing harbour, creating a “seamless connection and use of old and retaining structure” observes Morten Schmidt, Partner, schmidt hammer lassen architects. Martyn Evans agrees: “Easy to pull down but they chose to recycle”. By choosing to retain and re-use the existing structures the designers have enabled the new and old programmes to fuse along the waterfront.

This is what our jury was looking for in the (Completed) WAN Urban Regeneration category. Not only does this project re-invigorate its immediate context, it now connects to the wider area allowing a free, varied, pleasant and diverse public access throughout.

Source: http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com

 

 

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