World Architecture Festival is the A&D community’s annual global gathering. As founding partner, working with founder and programme director Paul Finch since 2008, our vision was to be an enabler of co-operation and communication in the industry. Our lead designer Patrick Speck presented the award for World Building of the Year at this year’s WAF in Lisbon, whose theme was appropriately enough “together”. For Patrick the design process for any new product or service starts with listening and understanding. This openness to new ideas he sees as the essence of WAF. 

The in-house design team has more than 130 designers, located in eight cities around the globe. The dynamic of pushing out into the world, absorbing and storing what can be learned from our interactions, then returning to base to unpack, analyse those insights and get inspired is replicated over the three days of WAF. If you wanted to tap into the mind of the A&D industry, this is where you’d start. The conversations that take place will shape products, and entire sectors in the coming years. 

Patrick describes the partnership with Paul Finch as “super-rich” with inspiration for him and the whole industry. This is the success of WAF, that it draws together architects and designers from all over the globe and every niche of our # industry to be inspired by one another. It is the festival’s founding ideal and what made us as a brand want to put our energy behind it. It succeeds not on a notion of prestige, although everyone wants to win one of the awards, or on the habit of coming together once a year, although it’s always great to see everyone again, but on the enduring value of sharing our thoughts. Enjoy Patrick’s chat with our Leader Architecture and Design Karl Lennon.