On 22-23rd of October Kazan held a big international event in the field of design, architecture and visual communications Best for Life Design Forum & Award. Metropolis won an award for «Best design bureau» for Sevastopol Ballet Academy project, where we acted as general designers.
The work of our project team was highly evaluated by the distinguished international expert council, including a world famous designer Karim Rashid; Carola Seybold, Head of Key Global Accounts at Pantone; Pierfrancesco Maran, Deputy Mayor of Milan for city planning, environment and agriculture; Timothy Jacob Jensen, CEO and Chief Designer at Timothy Jacob Jensen Studios; Ignat Bushukhin, Editor-in-chief at RBC Realty; Vitaliy Stavitskiy, President of Russia Designers Association; Buliash Todaeva, Founder of zerowaste.lab; Vitaliy Kochergin, professor at Architecture History and Urban Planning academic department of MARKHI; Andrey Kozhanov, Principal of Higher School of Branding, and others.
The award was presented to Metropolis Co-founder and Commercial Director Mohamed Nasser by the world famous designer Karim Rashid.
The Forum and the award ceremony were attended by Head of Kazan branch Denis Shvartzman and Marketing Director Alla Seryogina.
Mohamed was also a participant of the panel discussion Spaces & Places within the Forum. At this panel he presented the project of Sevastopol Ballet Academy, which will open its doors in 2023. The Academy is part of the cultural and educational cluster on Cape Khrustalny with total area 27 900 m2. It is supposed to consolidate big rehearsal halls, a dormitory, a comprehensive school and an audience hall in one building. The project reflects the tendencies of advanced world architecture with original composition of the building’s bulks, various elements of the façade and modern materials of external and internal finishing. Architectural solutions were developed by Coop Himmelb(l)au studio.
Alongside Mohamed in the panel discussion there were: Ilsiyar Tukhvatullina, Chief Architect of Kazan; Pierfrancesco Maran, Deputy Mayor of Milan for city planning, environment and agriculture, Marya Leontyeva from urban research institute «Tamga»; Anatoly Batalin, Director of Commercial department of «Sadovoe koltso» group of companies; Olga Nart, Commercial Director of AVA Group and Sergey Lyadov, PR Director of «Granel» group of companies. Vitaliy Stavitskiy, President of Russia Designers Association, was the moderator of the session.
The key topic of the Forum was the myths and stereotypes in design and the ways of overcoming it. The final event of the Forum was the Karim Rashid’s own lecture on the future of design. He told that the digital world is gradually supplanting the material world and today everything needs to be designed to create a fully uninterrupted, pleasant, empiric existence for people. The future of our aesthetic world crosses with all the aesthetic subjects in a certain way to merge design, art, architecture, fashion, food, music, culture, beauty together, bringing more elevated experience to our material and nonmaterial life.
Congratulations to our company with the professional recognition, to all the winners with the well-deserved awards, and thank you to the organizers of this event for the intense and interesting program!
