On the occasion of the fourth annual AZ Awards, we tracked down a few of the winners of our inaugural competition – including Boston’s Matter Design, London’s Campaign, and Toronto’s Alex Josephson – to see what new and exciting things they are up to.
Just weeks after Molo’s Softlight claimed the first-ever AZ Award for Best Lighting, the Vancouver design firm headed to Japan to open Nebuta House, a paper lantern museum dramatically clad in ribbons of red steel. Molo’s relationship with the country is ongoing; in March, Softlights featured prominently in a performance by the National Ballet of Japan. molodesign.com
In 2011, Brandon Clifford and Wes McGee’s Ply Shelf, a computer-modelled design for a plywood shelf, took the prize for Best Furniture. The Boston studio continues to devise elegant products and structures using advanced fabrication methods, including its La Voûte de Lefevre installation – a honeycombed, vaulted structure composed of 287 CNC‑routered plywood cells. matterdesignstudio.com
This London studio won Best Temporary Project for an installation created for Dunhill, one of a slew of eye-popping retail concepts it has worked on for such top fashion brands as Burberry and Nike. More recently, it crafted this travelling pavilion for Samsung that immersed visitors in a blue-tinged world of inflated bubbles. campaigndesign.co.uk
After graduating from the University of Waterloo, Alex Josephson – the first student to win the A+ Award – started Partisans with Pooya Baktash. Since then, the partners have let space-suited models wander through the offices of Extuple, a futuristic environment they recently completed, fitted with glass office partitions and a wavy, sculpted wooden ceiling. The duo is also among the teams at work on Union Station, Toronto’s central rail hub, now undergoing a major overhaul. The new station will bring to the city’s south end more than 14,800 square metres of space for food, shopping and culture. partisanprojects.com
The New York architect grabbed the jury’s attention, winning Best Unrealized Concept for his Metropolitan Vertical Amusement Park, and he is still thinking big. One of his latest schemes addresses megastore blight in Manhattan’s Lower East Side by topping several blocks of big box outlets with an artificial mountain. The green-scaped terrain would provide space for outdoor sports, a mountain bike route, and habitat for birds, trees and butterflies. juhyunkim.com