World Architecture Festival 2010

Now in its third year, the World Architecture Festival (WAF) attracts some of the most prominent names in the industry as well as providing a platform for the world's biggest architecture contest. Over 500 entries were received for the 15 categories for the 2010 awards, with selected projects from the shortlist chosen for exhibition during the Festival by a peerless jury. Robert Fiehn, Assistant Architecture and Design Editor at Phaidon, gives his pick of what not to miss at WAF 2010. 

Nowhere else in the world is there a larger and more internationally diverse meeting of architects than at the World Architecture Festival. Steadily growing in popularity, WAF 2010 is back in Barcelona, and this year features a super jury containing some of the biggest names within the architectural community, including Japanese starchitect Arata Isozaki (whose keynote speech is sure to be a Festival favourite); MoMA curator and Columbia Professor Barry Bergdoll; the innovative and influential structural engineer Hanif Kara; co-creator of the prestigious Scottish Parliament Building Benedetta Tagliabue; and the founder of TEN Arquitectos Enrique Norten.

Working alongside a much larger panel of jurors, these architecture experts have shortlisted 236 different projects - ranging from huge stadia, such as Soccer City in South Africa, down to a bamboo house in Costa Rica - for exhibition during the Festival. The three-day event will see presentations from all shortlisted projects, with the winners of each category announced at the awards ceremony on the final evening.

An exhibition featuring all 500+ entries will accompany the presentations, but my personal highlight of the accompanying thematic exhibition, Transformations, which explores architecture's ability to transform spaces, environment and the future through architectural imagination, technological development and professional teamwork. Always a sucker for museums, I am particularly excited to see the show featuring two very different cultural institutions: the Neues Museum in Berlin and the Red Location Museum in Port Elizabeth.

One of six shortlisted projects for the coveted Stirling Prize this year, the Neues Museum demonstrates that David Chipperfield is a master of the art of transformation. In association with Julian Harrap – a restoration specialist – Chipperfield has converted this war-ravaged 19th-century landmark into a poetic statement on the concept of rebirth through architecture - something far more powerful than renovation alone. Many elements of the original design have been painstakingly followed, while delicate interventions from Chipperfield inhabit the old structure as a pure architectural comment on form and structure. 

At the other end of the spectrum in terms of style and location is Noero Wolff’s remote Red Location Museum, set within the shanty towns of Port Elizabeth, in South Africa. This Apartheid testimonial rejects the more traditional role of the museum as a repository of historical objects, instead encouraging visitors to encounter and interpret the individual histories of those who fought against the oppressive regime. Each history is contained within a ‘memory box’, itself a tall exhibition space clad in the same corrugated metal that forms the houses in the surrounding slums. Noero Wolff has expertly transformed a Boer War concentration camp into a place for contemplation, tied inextricably to the local community.

I'd like to see the Ashmolean project win the Culture section but, in the light of the Stirling Prize outcome, it's likely it will go to Zaha Hadid's winning design for the MAXXI Museum in Rome. And if I had one other prediction for the awards it would be that, with the global obsession with football still at fever pitch after this year's World Cup, Soccer City is bound to win the Sport section.

Robert Fiehn is the Assistant Architecture & Design Editor at Phaidon