LONDON.- The National Museum of African American History and Culture, designed by Adjaye Associates, The Freelon Group, Davis Brody Bond, and SmithGroupJJR for the Smithsonian Institution, has been named the winner of the Beazley Design of the Year award. The annual prize and exhibition curated and hosted by the Design Museum in London has included previous winners such as IKEA and UNHCR’s Better Shelter, the London 2012 Olympic Torch and the Barack Obama Hope poster. Now in its tenth year, the award was presented at an exclusive dinner held inside the stunning central atrium of the Design Museum in Kensington.

Selected as the winner of the Architecture category, the landmark project designed by the recently knighted Sir David Adjaye overcame the other five category winners to claim the overall award.

2017 saw Adjaye knighted by Her Majesty the Queen for services to Architecture, following the previous award of an OBE in 2007. In 2017 he was also recognised as one of the 100 most influential people of the year by TIME magazine.

Architecture and overall winner:

Name: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C.
Designers: Adjaye Associates, The Freelon Group, Davis Brody Bond, SmithGroupJJR for the Smithsonian Institution
The museum was inaugurated by President Obama in September 2016 and is a long-awaited symbol for the African American contribution to the nation’s history and identity. The museum houses galleries, administrative spaces, theatre space and collections storage space. Sir David Adjaye’s approach created a meaningful relationship to this unique site as well as a strong conceptual resonance with America’s longstanding African heritage. The 313,000-square-foot building comprises a three-tiered structure covered in bronze plates. Designed to shade the glazed facades behind, the filigree cladding is patterned to reference the history of African American craftsmanship.

Category winners:

Digital category winner:
Name: Rapid Liquid Printing
Designers: MIT Self-Assembly Lab (Bjorn Sparrman, Kate Hajash, Shokofeh Darbari, Mattis Koh, Schendy Kernizan, Jared Laucks & Skylar Tibbits) in collaboration with Christophe Guberan, and Steelcase (Yuka Hiyoshi, Rob Poel, Markus McKenna, Paul Noll, Sharon Tracy, Edward Vander Bilt, Chris Norman & Charlie Forslund)
Rapid Liquid printing (RLP) physically draws in 3D space within a gel suspension, and enables the creation of large scale, customized products made of real-world materials. 3D printing hasn’t taken off as a mainstream manufacturing process as it is too slow compared to conventional processes, is limited by scale and the materials are typically low-quality. RLP addresses these limitations: it is incredibly fast (producing structures in a matter of minutes), designed for large scale products (you can print an entire piece of furniture) and uses real-world, industrial-grade materials.

Fashion category winner:
Name: Nike Pro Hijab
Designers: Rachel Henry, Baron Brandt, Megan Saalfeld and Brogan Terrell for Nike
Nike has worked alongside a team of athletes to develop a single-layer stretchy high-performance Hijab that could change the face of sport for Muslim women. Inspired by Sarah Attar’s win for Saudi Arabia at the 2012 Olympics, it was unveiled two days before International Women’s Day.

Graphics category winner:
Name: ‘Fractured Lands’, The New York Times Magazine, 14 August 2016
Designers: Jake Silverstein, Editor-in-Chief, Gail Bichler, Design Director, and Matt Willey, Art Director, for The New York Times Magazine
The Fractured Lands issue contained a single, very long (42 thousand word), nonfiction narrative by Scott Anderson and 20 photographs by Paolo Pellegrin. The product of some 18 months of reporting, it tells the story of the catastrophe that has fractured the Arab world since the invasion of Iraq 13 years ago, leading to the rise of ISIS and the global refugee crisis. The story gives the reader a visceral sense of how it all unfolded, through the eyes of six characters in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan.

Product category winner:
Name: AIR-INK
Designers: Graviky Labs
AIR-INK is the first commercially available ink made from air pollution. The clean-tech company has industrialized the process of capturing and recycling air pollution emissions into advanced pigments and inks.

Transport category winner:
Name: Scewo
Designers: Thomas Gemperle, Adrien Weber, Naomi Stieger, Stella Mühlhaus, Bernhard Winter, Pascal Buholzer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Scewo is a stairclimbing mobility device that will allow disabled persons to be more flexible and independently reach locations that were previously inaccessible. Scewo is a stairclimbing mobility device developed by a group of students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Using a retractable set of rubber tracks, the wheelchair can safely and smoothly travel both up and down stairs, while an extra pair of wheels at the rear of the chair allows users to raise the chair up so that they can engage with others at eye level.

In addition, visitors were able to vote for their favourite designs on the Design Museum website and in the gallery. The Nike Pro Hijab, a sports performance Hijab that was unveiled two days before International Women’s Day, received the most votes from the public.

The six category winners along with the further 56 other nominations are on display at the Design Museum until 18 February.