Dezeen Awards 2019 are encouraging African designers to enter

Dezeen Awards is the benchmark for international design excellence and the ultimate accolade for architects and designers everywhere.

The Dezeen Awards, created and hosted by Dezeen, one of the world’s most influential architectural and design websites, returns for a second year.

Attracting entries from countries around the world, with over 3600 entries received last year, the Dezeen Awards recognise those who are excelling and pushing the envelope in architecture and design. This year the organisers and judges panel would like to see more work originating from the African continent. They believe that artists and creatives from Africa have so much to offfer in terms of architecture and design and that the Dezeen Awards would be a great place for them to showcase this talent. 

Therefore, if you are an African designer, architect or creative send in your submissions before the 30 May 2019.

Winning the award gives up and coming designers the opportunity to present their work to some of the world's most prominent designers and places their work on a global stage.

This year, the team at Dezeen added 16 new categories including Cultural building, Rural house, Apartment Interior, Sustainable Design, Restaurant and Bar Interior, Product design, Installation Design, among many others.

The Dezeen Award itself was last year made from materials from the Dezeen homebase. Dutch designers, Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyck of Atelier NL, sourced London clay in order to create the trophy.

"Since Dezeen is founded and located in London, it was a very obvious choice to work with London clay," Sterk said.

While van Ryswyck was a speaker at last year's Design Indaba where she not only designed the speaker's gift which was made from sand from in the depleted Theewaterskloof Dam but she brought attention to the lack of sand around the world.

The judging panel for this year’s awards includes Design Indaba collaborators and former speakers.

These include Cape Town designer Atang Tshikare, a former Design Indaba Emerging Creative as well as another young designer, Ini Archibong, who spoke at Design Indaba last year as part of the Global Graduates.

As well as Bibi Seck who joined us back at Design Indaba this year as part of the IKEA collaboration with designers from across Africa who launched the Overallt range

The above structure, titled Tower of Twelve Stories was designed by Bureau Spectacular's Jimenez Lai and Joanna Grant. At last year's awards Bureau Spectacular won the Emerging Architect of the Year award. The towering structure is a fictional apartment block inspired by comic books and Leonard Cohen's song "Tower of Song".

The Tower of Twelve Stories is Bureau Spectacular's largest project thus far. The project was first unveiled at the 2016 Coachella Music Festival. At night the structure comes alive with dramatic lighting and images reflected off of the stark white surfaces.

While the winner of the Interior Project of the Year went to Casson Mann (above) who designed the interior of the new cave art museum in France.

Entries for the awards are open and the deadline for discounted entries is 29 March 2019. The final deadline for entries is 30 May 2019.

Click here to enter for the Dezeen Awards 2019.