Ann Dingli reviews the 2022 World Architecture Festival held in Lisbon at the end of November.

In 2013, a retrospective of the late architect Richard Rogers’s work at the Royal Academy in London positioned “cities as a high point in human achievement”.

A year later, Rogers gave the keynote speech at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore, discussing the city as a structure that supports the meeting of people – an economic framework for creating an exchange of goods and an exchange of ideas.

Almost 10 years later, the World Architecture Festival is still going, this year taking its stage in the ever-winsome city of Lisbon. This edition ran to a single-word theme, ‘Together’, yet its content addressed the concept only arbitrarily, instead tying more closely to Roger’s focus on cities as a measure of humanity’s performance, with individual building projects by and large being framed by their designers within their broader contextual narrative.

In 2022, however, the scope of focus moved beyond the city, encapsulating urbanity at evermore macro scales, at times scrutinising urban dynamics beyond the metropolis to cover nations at large, and in the case of keynote speaker Reinier de Graaf from OMA, positioning the breadth of the entire globe as the unit of measure for examination.

The World Architecture Festival was launched in 2008, kickstarting its story in the city of Barcelona. At its core, it has always been an event of dualities – it is both corporate and creative, expansive yet somehow intimate, with its almost monotonous regularity allowing the variety of its participants to shine through.

In practical terms, the festival is made up of hundreds of delegates who pay (increasingly exorbitant amounts of money) to compete for the coveted accolade of ‘World Building of the Year’, ‘Future Building of the Year’ or ‘Interior of the Year’.

Architects and designers enter their built and unbuilt projects into a competitive race along with thousands of international peers, distilling designs into two A2 boards that explain in a visual nutshell why their building, masterplan or interior space might be the most significant of its time.

AR Emerging Architect winner Instituto Balear de la Vivienda. Photo: Jose Hevia

If shortlisted, the entrants head to the festival’s designated city and explain in more detail (in strictly under 10 minutes) the scope, intention and impact of their work. It is judged over a fast-track period by the industry’s of-the-moment leaders, and finally, on the festival’s signature ‘Main Stage’, overall winners are announced to the world.

This format is unique to the event, and generates a part-trade fair, part-collegiate dynamic wherever it goes – although this year’s venue and attendees leaned significantly more to the commercial side than to the educational.

Yet, despite its limitations in presenting the truest possible global snapshot of architectural and urban trajectories – chiefly that many design practices cannot afford to be there – it still comes the closest to providing an outline of what is happening now, and what needs to be happening next, in the world’s built environment.

This year, the question of the environment as a barometer for human achievement came through most captivatingly in a lecture on the architectural evolution of Egypt.

The talk moved through a timeline of the country’s built character, examining how that character reflects the changing morality of its nationhood.

Locally, we are still architects of waste, promoting an overwhelmingly new-build, low-quality culture of development

Islam El Mashtooly – an Egyptian architect, urbanist and edu­cator – described the story of the country’s emerging built environment as an echo of the erosion of ‘tolerance’, a virtue he holds as inherent to Egypt’s collective conscious. As he took the audience through the timeline epoch by epoch, he drew parallels between the state of the built environment and the state of the country’s moral disposition. This link rang true to the evolution of a built environment closer to home.

The idea of a sliding definition between city and nation is unique when it comes to Malta, where urban density and adjacencies make it definable as a singular island-city – a chunk of urbanity made up of towns and villages with very little transitionary urban character.

Malta’s built environment occupies the unit of measure of both a city and a nation at once. As it does, it calls into analysis the entire span of its built environment, forcing us to look at its architecture as a whole to decipher what we are prioritising as its people.

What comes to mind as a result of that analysis is a far cry from the values championed at this year’s World Architecture Festival.

Where globally, delegates prioritised reuse and adaptation (the festival’s winning overall building was a predominantly retrofit one), locally, we are still architects of waste, promoting an overwhelmingly new-build, low-quality culture of development.

Where globally, projects showcased a concern for marginalised or minority end-users, locally, our building landscape is geared towards the wealthy, sowing seeds of social inequity more deeply than ever before.

Where globally, emerging practitioners are championing the use of local materials and indigenous building practices (see the AR Emerging Architect winners, Instituto Balear de la Vivienda), locally, we are squandering the islands’ most valuable natural real estate, sacrificing it to the transience of fast tourism and cheap trends.

World Architecture Festival 2022 in Lisbon. Photo: World Architecture Festival

At times, this year’s festival equally demonstrated architecture’s role as an accomplice to humankind’s malaises as opposed to its achievements. But at others, it revealed its potential for righting the wrongs that humanity has authored in recent decades.

The most crystallised instance of this was the WAFX Award, which showcased projects decreed by the curators of the festival to be the “most forward-looking architectural concepts, […] that identify key challenges that architects will need to address in the coming years”. Refreshingly, two of the award’s finalists were Malta-based projects.

In his keynote speech eight years ago, Rogers shed light on the 6,000-year-old lineage of cities. He recounted the historic episode of the Hellenic people being made citizens, revealing his favourite instance to be the moment they swore they would leave their city more beautiful than they found it. Rogers spoke about how, back then, beauty addressed “not just aesthetics, but goodness”.

With obvious exception and limi­tation, this intention appeared to be the general fight waged by the delegates and speakers at the 2022 World Architecture Festival – a fight for an architecture that can still expound the highest points of human achievement.

The festival was an authentic reflection of the world’s built environment and the people who make it – wildly imperfect and driven mainly by commercial gain. But at the heart of it all was an intent that felt altogether very human – a collective, earnest drive towards that which can truly be good.

The 2022 World Architecture Festival was held between November 30 and December 2 at the Feira Internacional de Lisboa Convention Centre in Lisbon, Portugal.