LEAF AWARDS 2012

21^st September 2012, Four Seasons Park Lane, LONDON 

This spectacular evening took place in the luxurious surroundings of the Four Seasons Park Lane Hotel which was admired by the many guests that attended.

The 2012 shortlist included some of the world’s most iconic buildings and designs.

The lucky winners of the evening were:

Mixed – Use Building of the year award
Steven Holl Architects with Daeyang Gallery & House, South Korea

Daeyang Gallery and House is a private gallery and house sited in the hills of the Kangbuk area of Seoul. It has three pavilions – one an entrance area, one an event space and one a private residence.

All three are arranged around a central pool of water and therefore seem to float on their own reflections. The pool is at eye level for visitors ascending the entrance staircase.

Our judges described this project as “an intriguing combination of commercial and living accommodation on a grand scale”. Both storeys of the structure were given their own identity, they said, “through the use of colour, form and contrasting materials pristinely detailed”.

House Roces is a steel and glass structure that has panoramic views from each of its living spaces and provides the experience of luxury living and maximum daytime lighting in shady forest surroundings.

Walls are windows and windows are load-bearing walls in a construction that expresses transparency and corporality at the same time.

The view from our judging panel was that House Roces was an exercise in minimalism that maximised “the structural capabilities of glass and the strength of steel applied creatively to a domestic concept”.

SA Residence in Dhaka is a three-storey residence based around the shape of the pure square and constructed of a single material, cast concrete.

Our judges praised the way this project has created a “cool domestic contrast for comfortable living in a hot environment”.

Residents of this multi-occupancy building can contemplate the peace and coolness created by the private swimming pool in its centre. This water court also acts as a natural exhaust system, allowing hot air to escape and creating a cool sanctuary.

Prominently situated at the entrance to Singapore’s historic Keppel Harbor, Reflections at Keppel Bay is a two-million-square-foot residential development comprised of 6 high-rise towers ranging from 24 and 41 stories and 11 low-rise villa apartment blocks of 6–8 floors– a total of 1,129 units.

The series of high-rise undulating towers is the focal point of this project. These sleek curving forms of alternating heights create graceful openings and gaps between the structures allowing all to have commanding views of the waterfront, Sentosa, the golf course and Mount Faber.

The Vivanta Hotel is a proud new landmark standing at the entrance to the new International Tech Park in Bangalore. It is a work/play environment and acts as an interface between the IT park and the fast-developing city around it.

Conceived as a ‘landscraper’, the hotel is a rich hospitality space where public and private functions flow and connect to each other. The hotel spaces have a cinematic feel that increases guest movement and interaction.

This was a particularly competitive category for our panel to judge. In the end, they loved the Vivanta Hotel’s use of coloured glass facades and a dynamic concrete structural form. They praised it for being “uncompromisingly modern” and “carefully landscaped to fit within a constricted site”.

The Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne puts children and their families first. Its aesthetic pulls in design elements from the Royal Park that surrounds the hospital, with lots of nature-based colours, textures and shapes that invite the human touch.

At the heart of the facility is a six-storey atrium, a naturally lit public thoroughfare that links all the elements of the hospital. There’s a two-storey coral reef aquarium and a meerkat enclosure to delight young patients.

The calming effects of nature are present here, and throughout the building, to make an otherwise stressful visit to the hospital something special.

The LEAF Award judges were impressed by this building’s special character. It’s a “large imposing complex structure”, they said, “creatively detailed to provide small-scale playful environments.

The Granary sits in the Roding Valley on London’s eastern reaches and is a fabulous example of new life being breathed into an old building to meet 21st-century needs.

The bronze-clad exterior of its new extension sits alongside the original Granary building, now refurbished, in a harmonious fusion of antique and contemporary.

The essence of the design was to optimise the use of interior space and to sensitively restore the derelict fabric with as light and gentle a touch as possible.

The Granary got the winning vote from our judges because they saw it as a “sympathetic extension to a robust industrial structure that enhanced a significant historic building”.

It’s a marvellous example of refurbishment.

Marco wins for his work on 2 White Grounds, a redesign and reshaping of a top-floor penthouse close to London’s famous Shard and London Bridge.

This glass structure sits elegantly on top of a 19th-century warehouse, transforming a cramped attic space into an exciting architectural solution.

There are eight panels of contemporary structural glass to complement the conservation area roof materials of lead and slate.

It’s effectively a bedroom – and a bathroom – under the stars, with sliding doors onto a terrace, so that the room is at once both interior and exterior.

Our judges called it “well detailed” and a “clever integration of glass technology and traditional construction”.

The Musashino Art University Museum and Library is a new public space for one of the distinguished art universities in Japan. Like a huge forest of books, the library is one large bookshelf on its interior and exterior walls.

For the people who use it, this two-storey building is a place of exploration and investigation. They can explore the shelves to find the books themselves, and they can walk round the spiral form to find new spaces to sit and read.

It’s a “sophisticated yet simple solution”, said the LEAF Award judges, and an excellent example of form following function. The building’s primary role of storing and retrieving books becomes the concept for the interior and exterior design.

Designed by Stephen Marshall Architects the scheme broadly follows the footprint of the existing farm buildings on the site, using strong references to the agricultural past through the groupings of the buildings around a courtyard and the materials used. The complex consists of two rectangular blocks facing each other across a courtyard, one housing the Reading Room, archive stores and study rooms, the other the Rothschild Foundation offices.

The Druk White Lotus School, sits in a high-altitude desert landscape in northern India, which is often cut off by snow for five months of the year and where temperatures fall as low as -30 degrees centigrade.

It’s a school for almost 500 pupils from nursery through to the age of 14. Inside, timbers from Kashmir line the learning spaces and, outside, low granite walls and traditional mud roofs echo the landscape and minimise the building’s impact.

The school’s sustainability credentials are impressive. Classrooms face the morning sun to make the most of natural light and heat and solar water heaters provide hot water for showers and clothes washing. A photovoltaic system provides electricity to the whole site and solar pumps supply all water requirements from two boreholes.

Our judges praised the school for its self-sufficiency and for using local materials in a way that makes it “grow out from the landscape”.

Due to be completed in 2015, Manhattan Loft Gardens is a 42-storey tower near London’s Olympic Park that will provide 248 private living spaces, a 150-room world-class hotel, a swimming pool and spa, conference facilities and three separate sky gardens.

Skidmore Owings + Merrill have created a building whose exterior will mix transparent and solid panels, aligned to reduce the amount of sunlight entering the building on certain facades.

For our judges, this was a “high-rise development with many innovative features for contemporary living, carefully integrated into a single structure with a modest footprint”.


Best Future Building 2012 (joint winners): Skidmore Owings + Merrill with Manhattan Loft Gardens, London

The Rock Stadium in Al Ain has been conceived for Al Dar Properties and is a visionary design that merges landscape and architecture seamlessly.

Sunken into the cooler sands of the desert and using a volcanic rock outcrop as part of its structure, this stadium blends into its surroundings and works creatively with the topography.

Local rock and sand will be used in construction and it will be a large-scale venue capable of seating 40,000 people yet which is camouflaged in the empty desert landscape.

The verdict from our judges was simple. “Unique and dramatic”.

This year LEAF Awards is honoring Daniel Libeskind with the LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN THE ARCHITECTURAL COMMUNITY award

Since establishing his practice in Berlin in 1989, Mr. Libeskind has designed major cultural, commercial and residential projects around the world. These include the master plan for the World Trade Center and the Jewish Museum Berlin. In 2012 his firm, Studio Daniel Libeskind, completed Reflections at Keppel Bay, a two-million-square-foot residential development in Singapore and  in October of 2011, completed  the redesign of what is now Germany’s largest museum, the Military History Museum in Dresden. The same month Hong Kong’s City University celebrated the opening of the Libeskind-designed Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre. Other recent projects include the Grand Canal Theatre project, a major addition to Dublin’s docklands and the city’s cultural core; Crystals at CityCenter, a 500,000-square-foot retail complex that is the centerpiece of MGM Mirage’s signature development on the Las Vegas Strip.

Daniel Libeskind Mr. Libeskind has taught and lectured at many universities worldwide. He has held such positions as the Frank O. Gehry Chair at the University of Toronto, Professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany, the Cret Chair at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Louis Kahn Chair at Yale University. He has received numerous awards including the 2001 Hiroshima Art Prize — an award given to an artist whose work promotes international understanding and peace, never before given to an architect.

Born in post-war Poland, Daniel Libeskind immigrated to America with his family becoming an American citizen in 1964. A virtuoso musician at a young age, he gave up music to study architecture. Mr. Libeskind holds a degree in Architecture from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City and a postgraduate degree in the History and Theory of Architecture from the School of Comparative Studies at Essex University in England. Mr. Libeskind lives in New York with his wife and business partner Nina Libeskind.

It’s a “sophisticated yet simple solution”, and an excellent example of form following function. The building’s primary role of storing and retrieving books becomes the concept for the interior and exterior design.