Deny Jones Architekt & Amat Habito have been named as the winner of the Isolation Transformed Competition by World Architecture Festival at WAFVirtual, taking place online from 30 November to 4 December 2020.

Their concept answered the challenge of the competition with a genuine transformation of isolation. It does so by imaginatively tackling a neglected and even unpromising topic for architecture: the huge rates of deaths from Covid-19 in care home facilities around the world.

Inspiration is taken from the relationship between boats and jetties; living units are prefabricated in timber to generous dimensions deriving from the logistics of transporting them to site.

Image courtesy of Deny Jones Architekt & Amat Habito

"The presentation is elegant and beautifully drawn; and the proposal would make a great place to live with or without Covid-19," said Paul Finch Programme Director of World Architecture Festival.

World Architecture Festival and storytelling platform PechaKucha joined forces to launch a competition for designers thinking about future post-virus environments. "The Covid-19 crisis has focused attention on the living and collective spaces we inhabit and use in our everyday life," said WAF. 

The competition was free-to-enter and open to all architects, designers and engineers. The best ideas will be exhibited at World Architecture Festival 2021 and all entries will be free to view on a dedicated WAF page on PechaKucha.

There were also two highly commended and two commended ideas from the competition.

Highly commended:

"Architectural Vaccine" by Pablo Cevallos Cisernos. This entry had an interesting approach to adding vertical green space to dense urban environments as an outlet for minimal dwelling units.

"Quarter-mile suburbia" by Spencer Bauer. This proposal rethinks suburbia considering Covid to create small neighbourhood clusters to enhance interaction and community connection.

Commended:

"From Religion to Rehabilitation" by Akash Ganguly and Madhavi Sharma. A proposal unique in its specificity around a population and cultural event - conveyed with evocative renderings - that uses the pandemic as a catalyst for an architectural intervention to deliver lasting social transformation.

"Shibuya Turning Crossing Point" by Keisuke Tamura and Silvia Rulli. This is a wonderful telling of an extraordinary story – the organic and irresistible growth of an urban transportation behemoth, one of the most densely packed places in the world, and its sudden emptying brought about by the Covid lockdown.

You can see all of the winning and shortlisted presentations here. 

You can watch back the Isolation Transformed presentation that took place during WAFVirtual by registering for free on this page. 

The real events, World Architecture Festival and INSIDE World Festival of Interiors, will take place from 23 to 25 June 2021 at the FIL exhibition centre in Lisbon, Portugal. Awards entries for WAF and INSIDE 2021 will close on 8th January 2021.

World Architecture Community is official Media Partner of WAF and INSIDE and will be bringing you the latest news about the festivals' speaker line-up and sessions. In addition, WAC readers can receive an exclusive 20% discount over entry fees and delegate passes for WAF and INSIDE for the next year by entering this promo code online: WAC2020.

Top image courtesy of Deny Jones Architekt & Amat Habito.

> via WAF