I’m back in my London home, sick with covid, looking over the frozen black trees of Epping Forest, pining for Miami Beach. I need a little more of that low-slung fever-dream of a town; more of its mint, peach, flamingo and lemon hues; more of its endless Art Deco. You’ll know the Ocean Drive hits – the wedding cake hotels, the neon, the chrome eyebrows – but wander two blocks inland and it keeps going, rolling through quiet hedge-lined residential streets now busy with delivery bots (forever working wheeled drones with names like Habib, Ingrid and Lisa) and made even more charming by a network of smooth, breezy cycle lanes.

I was there for WAF 2025, the world’s largest live judged architecture awards, but stayed on for a day, soaking up the 27 degree C winter sun before flying back to London E17. The trip didn’t start well: my early flight was cancelled, and I spent eight hours in Terminal 3, Tom Hanksing around until the next one. But who am I to complain? Poor old Chris Williamson, the newly minted RIBA president, was bumped until the next day when the judging was set to begin.

And begin it did, at 9am sharp, and in some style. Picture a vast, grey black, windowless hall filled with white inflatable crit rooms: pure sci fi, part Kafka, part Kubrick, heavily seasoned with JG Ballard sauce. WAF director Paul Finch stood on stage to explain the judging process, flanked by two watchful bodyguards built like Brutalist housing blocks. It was my first Miami tableau. There would be many, many more.

The day was long. Eight hours of crits and feedback after a ten-hour flight can scramble anyone’s brain, but the projects I reviewed with my fellow judges – architects Heather Dodd (chairing) from South Africa and Jamaica’s Kevin McMorris – were mostly bangers.

We were judging the housing category, and by the day’s end, two schemes had pulled ahead of the pack: both social housing, one Spanish, the other American, both exceptional. First up, the runner-up: Urbanitree’s Terrazas para la vida, providing 40 homes in Barcelona, its mass timber CLT frames and ground floor fab lab, a perfect expression of the Catalan capital’s pace setting urbanism, and a go-sign for a national vision of new forestry and housing as infrastructure that all of us really, should be vying to replicate.

Completed Buildings: Housing Highly Commended 2025: Terrazas para la vida by Urbanitree

Miraculously, using shipping containers no less, Ghazal Khezri with Geoffrey Sorrell – of LA practice Lorcan O’Herlihy – went one better with the ultrapractical Isla Intersections, which grabbed the housing category gong (it would go on to win the American Beauty Prize too.)

Their project, led by Ghazal, occupies an impossibly tight triangle of land alongside the monstrous tangle of the 110–105 interchange in South LA – once just noise, fumes, and leftover scrub. Formerly of Coop Himmelb(l)au, Ghazal has placed 54 homes for homeless people (including ten for army vets) pretty much beneath one of the world’s busiest roads. The stacked shipping containers are painted a crisp, defiant white and arranged in a decidedly Decon plan. Peter Cook, on the supercrit jury for the final day, ‘loved it’.

Completed Buildings: Housing Winner 2025: Isla Intersections by Lorcan O’Herlihy (Photo: Eric Staudenmaier)

The sculptural composition steps down to ground level, opens up a central courtyard and fashions a crinkled edge for a new paseo, a walkable green street shielded by berms, with space for retail and workshops. Despite the hard metal aesthetic, it’s a gentle response in a brutal context and, yes, ok, I’ve not been there – yet – but we all sensed it made a proper place out of nothing. Ferocious and friendly at once, its sheer verve left our jury reeling. Remember the name: Ghazal Khezri. She makes you believe buildings (and architects) can fix things.

For me, the rest of WAF was all about chat, sometimes on-site, sometimes off: with Beatrice Galilee after her keynote, in which she casually reminded the room that architecture can still be radical, international, and humane. With Lily Jencks wandering Herzog de Meuron’s Pérez Art Museum, pointing out details I’d missed. With Roger Zogolovitch (Zog) about chaos theory, a ‘90s pop science idea whose times has finally come. With Jason Bruges, then David West, about the duelling joys and perils of fathering teenage daughters. With Rob Shaw and Harry Thomson about Studio Shaw’s chances of landing the Manser Medal for their ultrapractical Catching Sun House (my favourite whatever the result).

With Viviana Muscettola of Zaha Hadid, about where’s better to live in London – Bloomsbury or Angel, Islington. With Simon Henley and Simon Bayliss (of Henley Halebrown and HTA) about how architects you assume will sidestep WAF eventually show up anyway. With Freddie Jackson, about his cyberpunk Ray Bans – glasses that take photos of whatever he sees. With Peruvian young gun Moises Porras, another one to watch, about trad modelmaking as the ultimate studio design tool. And with everyone at the fab gala dinner about who wasn’t there: delegates blocked by US visa bans, Iranian architecture rendered invisible, entire strands of global practice banned by petty politics.

Here in Walthamstow, still covid-addled, there’s a flash of lemon-green, a local parakeet, and just like that I’m back on Ocean Drive. That’s the thing about WAF: it doesn’t really end. Instead, it follows you home.

Rory Olcayto writes for PTE Architects. He is a former editor of The Architects’ Journal.