World Architecture Festival’s Inside 2024 Shortlist Celebrates Stunning Interior Designs from Around the World

Inside is the sister festival of the World Architecture Festival (WAF), the world’s biggest live architectural awards programme, celebrating the very best in interior design. Both Inside and WAF finalists will present their projects to a panel of judges live at the international festival in Singapore.

The 2024 Inside Shortlist represents over 80 interior projects from across the globe, in cities including: New York City, Dubai, Beijing, Osaka, São Paolo, Phuket, Delhi, Auckland, Mexico City, Lisbon, and London. Leading design firms to feature in this year’s shortlist include Foster + Partners, Broadway Malyan, Nikken Sekkei and Office AIO. Many emerging design firms will also be on stage, live pitching against the big names.

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It celebrates the best new completed interiors across ten categories, ranging from Hotels to Workplace, and Residential to Retail, each giving a window into the most cutting-edge interior design concepts and trends from around the world.

Inside and WAF will be back in Singapore for its 17th edition. This follows previous editions of the festival in Lisbon, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Berlin. In addition to the unique live-judged awards programme and crit presentations, this year’s event will include a live events programme with keynote talks and insightful seminars from an international panel of speakers around the theme of ‘Tomorrow’.

On the final day of the festival, category winners from across all ten Inside awards will go head-to-head for the accolade of 2024 Interior of the Year. On the same day the WAF finalists will compete against each other for Landscape of the Year, Future Project of the Year and World Building of the Year.

Amongst the interiors projects to be shortlisted this year are the Zhengze School by WIT Design & Research, the renovation of an abandoned paper mill in Beijing into a primary school, the Embassy of Australia, Washington D.C., by Bates Smart, and The Fennia Block, by Olla Architecture, which sees the redevelopment of a historic block in the centre of Helsinki, Finland into a restaurant and retail space.

Shortlisted Public Buildings include the Young V&A in east London, by AOC Architecture and De Matos Ryan, the UK’s first national museum built with and for young people, and the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra Hall, by MAMA architects, celebrating Lithuanian culture through innovative acoustics and design.

The full shortlist for this year’s Inside projects can be viewed here.

Inside programme director Paul Finch comments: “A welcome increase in entries this year has given the shortlisting judges a pleasant challenge – with a record number of finalists heading to Singapore this year. Emerging trends include vivid colours, greater use of planting, and the creation of innovative hybrid spaces for multiple uses. We look forward to meeting the finalists this November, and to rewarding creative work of a very high standard.”