World Architecture Festival has announced winner for GROHE Water Research Prize. The Water Research prize is funded by GROHE and is part of the World Architecture Festival annual awards programme. 

Researchers from the University of Patras, Greece, have won a £10,000 research prize to investigate how rainwater can be used to help cool facades of buildings in super-hot cities.

This is the third time it has been awarded; other winners have included water filtration and generation programmes in Peru and Brazil. This year’s winner was announced yesterday during the WAFVirtual event taking place online between the 30 November – 4 December, where the winning team presented their ideas.

The winning project is a suspended modular lightweight facade system for evaporative cooling with harvested rainwater. A light-weight structure which can be retrofitted to existing building facades will now be developed with façade consultants. 

Rainwater will be collected in a roof-tank and used within the system which will spray some of it onto the building, while retaining as much as possible. The lead researcher of the winning team is Professor K.A. Liapi from the Department of Architecture, School of Engineering, University of Patras in Greece.

Researchers say the new structure, when developed, "will combine art, technology, architecture and mathematics", serving as a prototype which will be able to include planting to further help in cooling strategies.

The judges praised the proposal for a variety of reasons.

"What I liked most about the winning entry is that it uses a clever blend of environmental and product design, and at its heart it promotes sustainability in dense urban environments," said Patrick Speck, Leader, LIXIL Global Design, EMENA.

"We decided as a jury that this project was a worthy winner because it exploits the scare resource of water in a creative way and promotes sustainability via a visually impressive facade," said Paul Finch, Programme Director, World Architecture Festival.

In 2020, WAF is running a free online festival taking place between 30 November – 4 December 2020. You can register for free to WAFVirtual here. David Adjaye, Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha, Ralph Johnson, Jean Mah, Ole Scheeren, Vicente Guallart, Jeanne Gang are among speakers at WAFVirtual. See the full program of WAFVirtual here. 

WAF is the world’s largest annual, international, live architectural event. It includes the biggest international architectural awards programme in the world, dedicated to celebrating excellence via live presentations to an audience of high-profile delegates and international juries.

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.

All images courtesy of WAF.

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