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    Patricia Urquiola and Keiji Ashizawa among judges to decide Dezeen Awards 2024 winners

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    Eighteen leading architects and designers met this week to decide the winners of Dezeen Awards 2024, which will be revealed at the Dezeen Awards 2024 party in November.

    The Dezeen Awards master jury took place at the One Hundred Shoreditch hotel in London and included architect Keiji Ashizawa and designers Patricia Urquiola and Lee Broom.
    Designers Peter Mabeo and Pilar Zeta, as well as interior designer Claudia Afshar and architect Alexandra Hagen also joined to finalise the 46 award winners.
    A dedicated panel of industry experts including Mina Hasman and Pooran Desai met to determine the winner of the Bentley Lighthouse Award, a special award supported by Bentley that rewards an individual whose work has had an overwhelmingly beneficial impact on social and environmental sustainability.
    Winners will be announced in November 

    Winners will be announced at the end of November at the Dezeen Awards 2024 party in London with shortlist announcements made in October. Guests at the party will be the first to find out who has won the prestigious project of the year awards across architecture, interiors, design and sustainability.
    Also unveiled at the ceremony will be this year’s Designers of the Year, where we asked readers to put forward designers for consideration who have been finally shortlisted and selected by Dezeen’s editorial team.
    White Arkitekter CEO Alexandra Hagen was on the architecture master jury panelThe master jury discussed 225 shortlisted entries selected from 4,000 projects from just under 100 countries around the globe.
    Joining Ashizawa and Hagen on the architecture master jury panel were Saudi-based architect Sumaya Dabbagh, Spacon & X co-founder Nikoline Dyrup Carlsen and Reddymade founder Suchi Reddy.
    Hagen was joined by Japanese architect Keiji Ashizawa”Design is a powerful tool to achieve change and it’s clear much of the creativity in architecture today is directed towards building more sustainable societies,” said Hagen.
    “It gives me hope for the future.”
    Patricia Urquiola was one of the master jury judgesUrquiola and Afshar were joined by Carolina Maluhy + Partners founder Carolina Maluhy, and Bentley head of design collaborations Chris Cooke.
    On judging the interiors winners, Urquiola remarked “we were all connected to interior design but with very different perspectives”.
    “Yet, in the end, there was a shared sensitivity”, she continued, “it confirmed that we are a community with diverse ways of exploring, driven by a shared vision, even where our approaches differ.”
    Lee Broom discussing a design project with Pilar ZetaBritish industrial designer Tej Chauhan, who was part of the panel to decide the winners of the design categories, concurred.
    “Evaluating the unique sensitivities of each was incredibly interesting,” he said. “While our perspectives differed at times, we all came to a joint decision on very deserving winners.”
    “A really enjoyable day of judging”
    Chauhan continued, “we had to wrap our minds around some exceptional projects across a wide range of sectors. It was a really enjoyable day of judging projects that ultimately left us feeling nourished and inspired.”
    Deliberating alongside Chauhan to decide the winners of the design categories were Broom, Mabeo and Zeta and Parisian designer Inga Sempé.
    Botswana-based designer Peter Mabeo joined the design master jury panelHenrik Taudorf Lorensen, founder and CEO of Copenhagen-based furniture design studio Takt, and Malin Orebäck, design strategist and senior advisor at the Research Institutes of Sweden’s (RISE) Circular Business Lab, were on the sustainability panel alongside Hasman and Desai.
    “The imagination this year’s entries embody is truly an inspiration,” said Desai.
    “It is exactly what we need to put our society back on a track to build a better world for us all.”
    Dezeen Awards judge Alessio Nardi and Human Nature chief impact officer Joanna Yarrow, joined for dinnerFollowing the day of judging, an exclusive drinks reception and dinner took place on the night of the master jury day in the One Hundred Room at One Hundred Shoreditch, where the master jury was joined by the Dezeen Awards community including judges past and present.
    These included product designer Jasper Morrison, Design, Bitches co-founder Rebecca Rudolph and multidisciplinary designer Bethan Laura Wood.
    Dezeen Awards winners’ party tickets on sale
    Following the shortlist announcements in October, the next big date in the Dezeen Awards calendar is the pinnacle of this year’s programme – the Dezeen Awards winners’ party, which will take place on Tuesday 26 November at Hackney Church in London.
    The event will be a chance for everyone who entered this year’s Dezeen Awards to celebrate their achievements alongside fellow nominees, winners and our esteemed Dezeen Awards judges. We also invite the wider architecture and design community to join us for this special occasion.
    Guests will be treated to a night of drinks, food, live entertainment and music, and Dezeen Awards winners will be able to collect their trophies and certificates on stage.
    Tickets are available at a 20 per cent discounted rate of £216 for all studios that entered this year’s Dezeen Awards, and £270 for everyone else. Plus, save an additional 10 per cent on the standard ticket price when you book a package of five or more tickets. Subscribe to the Dezeen Awards newsletter to keep up to date with the latest announcements on the party.
    The photography is by Mark Cocksedge.
    Dezeen Awards 2024 in partnership with Bentley
    Dezeen Awards is the ultimate accolade for architects and designers across the globe. The seventh edition of the annual awards programme is in partnership with Bentley as part of a wider collaboration to inspire, support and champion design excellence and showcase innovation that creates a better and more sustainable world. This ambition complements Bentley’s architecture and design business initiatives, including the Bentley Home range of furnishings and real estate projects around the world. More

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      Lee Broom presents Divine Inspiration lighting in theatrical Milan exhibition

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      British designer Lee Broom has unveiled his largest exhibition at Milan design week to date, showcasing six new lighting designs in a setting that echoes brutalist architecture and places of worship.

      As part of the exhibition, called Divine Inspiration, Broom has taken over an entire building in Milan’s Brera district and filled it with more than 100 lights.
      Across a series of rooms, the designer is presenting pieces that borrow from the monumental, ethereal quality of religious buildings and artefacts, particularly those designed in the mid-20th century.
      Divine Inspiration is Lee Broom’s largest-ever Milan exhibitionDesigns on show include Vesper, a geometric pendant design with its roots in modernist cathedral lighting, and Requiem, which takes the form of draped fabric.
      “I have always loved brutalist architecture, even as a child,” said Broom, reflecting on his early years growing up in Birmingham and visits to buildings such as the now-demolished Central Library by John Madin.

      The exhibition showcases six lighting designs in a church-like setting”I wanted this collection to be mainly inspired by that,” he told Dezeen. “But when I started researching, I discovered the places I was most drawn to were places of worship.”
      “This led me on a fascinating journey to researching cathedrals, temples and churches, from antiquity to mid-century to the present day,” he added.
      “I wanted to create a lighting collection that invoked that same sense of awe and mysticism as those buildings and their interiors.”
      The tile-like Pantheum light illuminates a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed urnThe exhibition starts in a relatively small room that Broom describes as being like a decompression chamber.
      At its centre is a large-scale stone urn designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, in a nod to the Unity Chapel built by the modernist architect in Illinois in 1908.
      Illuminating this space is the Pantheum wall light, which takes its cues from the coffered concrete ceiling of the Pantheon in Rome. Several of the lights are arranged like tiles, cast in Jesmonite and sandblasted to give a rough texture to their tiered forms.
      A six-metre-long pendant of fluted Hail lights is reflected in a mirror belowThe next room is a large hall, where Broom’s fluted aluminium Hail lights are arranged to create a six-metre-long hanging installation, positioned above a mirror to create the impression that the pendant stretches into infinity.
      “When you walk in, you see a 12-metre extension of this light,” said Broom. “The idea is to reference the idea of the rapture, of going up into the heavens.”
      The Altar pendants consist of illuminated tiles encased in sculpted oakA staircase leads up to a mezzanine showcasing the slender Altar pendants, which combine illuminated tubes with a smooth body of carved oak.
      These are organised around a contemporary altar, where a matching carved-oak font is framed by a large vertical disc of stainless steel.

      Twelve unmissable exhibitions and installations at Milan design week

      A grand installation of the extruded aluminium Vesper lights takes over the next space.
      Here, Broom’s team designed a stained-glass decal informed by mid-century designs and applied it over the windows. The brushed silver and gold-coloured lights are suspended in front, arranged both vertically and horizontally.
      “It’s a dramatic, ecclesiastical moment but it’s uplifting because of the colours and the amount of natural light,” said Broom. “You get to see all the different angles of these lights. They’re like brutalist sculptures with these modern, illuminated connections.”
      Dozens of Vesper lights are installed in front of windows with a stained-glass effectThe penultimate room is a basement featuring Chant, a light inspired by glass blocks, while the final room showcases the four different forms of the Requiem light.
      Unlike his other products, Broom makes each Requiem light himself by hand. The process involves dipping fabric into plaster and sculpting it around illuminated rings, tubes or spheres.
      “The process reminds me of draping fabric on a tailor’s dummy,” said Broom, who studied fashion design at Central Saint Martins before becoming a product designer.
      The Chant lights take their cues from glass blocksRequiem comes in four versions and Broom will make a limited edition of 15 for each.
      “I’ve been in business for 15 years and things have grown rapidly,” Broom explained. “So I thought for this piece it would be really nice to get back to basics.”
      “I really wanted to get my hands dirty and actually get my hands physically on the pieces,” he added. “The idea was to make them look like pieces of draped fabric with light sculptures inside them. But they’re actually solid plaster.”
      The final room features the four limited-edition Requiem lightsBroom has created many extravagant Milan exhibitions in the past, including the celestial Observatory in 2018, the carousel-style Time Machine in 2017 and the Salone del Automobile delivery van in 2016.
      The designer hopes that the Divine Inspiration exhibition – and the soothing soundtrack that plays throughout – will provide visitors with a calming, ethereal experience.
      The Requiem lights look like draped fabric. Photo by Arthur WoodcroftAlthough he doesn’t describe himself as a religious person, Broom believes that places of worship have a uniquely powerful ability to provoke introspection and reverence.
      “The key thing is to take people on an emotional journey,” he said. “I don’t see why design can’t evoke some of the same emotions we feel from art, architecture or theatre.”
      The photography is by Luke Hayes unless otherwise stated.
      Divine Inspiration is part of Milan design week 2022, which takes place from 6 to 12 June 2022. See our Milan design week 2022 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.

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