As 2022 comes to a close, one of my favorite pastimes before the New Year’s countdown begins is scrolling through the countless best-of lists of the year. One best-of list I keep my eyes peeled for is the Dezeen annual awards.
Dezeen has just announced its fifth annual awards for the world’s best architecture, interiors & design, studios, and individual artists including some of the world’s most innovative design talent. The Dezeen Awards are considered the “benchmarker for international design excellence and the ultimate accolade for architects and designers everywhere.”
There are 47 categories overall, however, I chose 7 winners to share with you here. Visit Dezeen’s complete list of winners here.
Project: Twentieth
Artist(s): Woods + Dangaran
Word from the Artist:
“Upon entering the heart of the home, the eclectic yet sophisticated formal living room greets visitors, while the family room is cozy by comparison. Adding further dimension to Twentieth, textures and finishes are highlighted through bespoke accents, with timeless natural stone, wood, and hand-plastered surfaces serving as a canvas to pops of color such as deep avocado and sumptuous salmon elegantly personalizing the space for warmth and character.”
Apartment Interior of the Year
Project: Shoji Apartment
Artist(s): Proctor and Shaw
Word from the Artist:
“This project was a study in materiality, transparency, and enclosure, conceived as a prototype for micro-living in existing housing stock characterized by a constrained footprint but traditionally generous ceiling heights. Poky and uncomfortable cellular rooms are replaced by a generous multi-functional living space arranged around a translucent sleeping pod, influenced by Japanese Shoji screens.”
Urban House of the Year
Project: 8-Yard House
Artist(s): Studio Bright
Word from the Artist:
“This project, on a double-fronted site in inner suburban Melbourne, is an existing dilapidated brick veneer that interrupted the procession of terrace house facades. Meanwhile, the new 8-Yard House insertion is seen as a street-healing gesture, but true to its own time and purpose. This new house for a large family reflects our ongoing desire to prioritize outdoor spaces as much as indoor ones. Rather than have one singular backyard and the bulk of the house as one mass, the planning, and spaces are distributed along the length of the site, punctuated with a series of variously sized outdoor courtyards. By applying the streetscape rhythm to parts of its proportions and fenestration, the street facade seeks to both empathize with context and yet address the disruptive site width. Accommodating a bedroom-garden-courtyard in direct proximity to the street, the brick surface softens and dissolves from a referenced formal composition to a more ambiguous receding curved hit-and-miss screen element, while still holding onto material continuity.”
Project: Marfa Ranch
Artist(s): Lake Flato Architects
Word from the Artist:
“The project borrows from the area’s earliest structures and is organized around a courtyard shaded by the dappled light of native mesquite trees with a small fount of collected rainwater. To keep the house cool in summer and warm in winter, the structure is built of two-foot-thick walls of rammed earth. The house embraces the expansive landscape with lightweight breezeways and porches made of recycled oil field pipe. Situated on a low rise with dramatic views in each direction, it cuts a low profile, settling naturally into the desert.”
Landscape Project of the Year
Project: Little Island
Artist(s): Heatherwick Studio, Arup, and MNLA.
Word from the Artist:
“This project is a new public park that shelters three new performance venues along the Hudson River. Designed as a haven for the people and wildlife of New York, it’s a real green oasis, held above the water by sculptural planters in the form of ‘modular petals.’ Little Island is located just a short walk across a gangplank from Manhattan’s Lower West Side where visitors will walk past over 100 tree species planted throughout the park.”
Project: Mother and Child
Artist(s): Adam & Arthur
Word from the Artist:
“The project is a considered piece created with straw marquetry, a technique that encompasses the art of handcrafting decorative patterns from ribbon-thin, flattened slithers of rye straw. Traditionally white straw is never seen in straw marquetry, as it is challenging to create. After much experimentation a system was created to produce a rich pearlescent tone, requiring over 16,000 individual ribbons of straw. The result explores sculptural forms and their intersection with straw marquetry to allow the emergence of one form from the other, much like the relationship between mother and child.”
Lighting Design of the Year
Project: High Profile
Artist(s): MVRDV
Word from the Artist:
“The High Profile series is a range of luminaires inspired by a residual product: leftover aluminum profiles. MVRDV introduced the idea to develop a new design with Delta Light’s waste material, instead of inventing a completely new product. The name stems from profile lighting as a key part of architecture which often produces offcuts as a residual product – these scrap elements became the starting point of the design. The resultant design looks critically at the manufacturing process, finding not only opportunity but also beauty in elements that are normally discarded as waste.”
Scroll through Dezeen’s 2022 award winners for endless inspiration and a peak into the architecture and design of 2023. These artists, designers, and architects are years ahead of the curve. I can’t wait to see what the future holds!
