AJ Student Prize 2021: Sustainability Award shortlist

If architecture is to respond adequately to the climate crisis then a veritable transformation is required; not only in practice but also in architectural education. It is heartening, therefore, to report that huge and positive changes are afoot if the third year of the AJ Student Prize’s Sustainability Award is anything to go on.

Something has suddenly clicked over the past year and, as well as receiving more than 40 submissions for the award – a new record – the standard of entries has been outstanding, with projects that engage head on with the key practical questions provoked by the climate and biodiversity crises and other sustainability challenges.

 

Birmingham City University, Birmingham School of Architecture and Design

Anita Brindley (postgraduate)

Course MArch
Unit E.R.A. (Extinction Rebellion Architecture)
Project Grow Your Own High Street

Project description Tackling issues of rising CO₂ levels caused by unsustainable construction practices, the scheme proposes reforesting Bristol’s Old Market High Street, creating a central regenerative system of carbon capture and material production at the heart of the city. The project intends to pedestrianise and fully green the high street through tree growth, which aids water regulation and removes heat from the air. Looking to the future, the forest provides a local material supply for redevelopment. An existing low-grade building is upgraded using materials grown on-site, while a Timber Education Centre is also proposed to teach the community how to build with sustainably sourced wood. The project imagines our cities as carbon sinks and closed-loop systems where all construction materials are produced just metres away from the site and proves there is enough space along the high street for carbon offsetting.

Tutor citation This project was entered due to the in-depth rigour of the thinking, in which all aspects of sustainable (or even restorative) architecture are thought through. The proposal tackles re-use and sustainable upgrading of an existing low-grade building, using materials that would be grown on-site, while also providing a positive vision for future high streets. Rachel Sara and Elly Deacon-Smith

London Metropolitan University, School of Art, Architecture and Design

James Jackson (postgraduate)

Course MArch
Unit 05: The Borrowed Landscape
Project Retrofitting the Banal

Project description 54 Kennington Road is a 1980s hotel in Lambeth which is facing complete demolition. Perceived to be of little architectural significance, it is in good condition and therefore this project promotes its re-use embracing circular economy principles. It suggests that retrofit of banal buildings like these need not treat the existing with the same reverence as conservation and proposes an alternative approach that deals with the everyday – where new additions are woven into the existing like a tapestry. The hotel is adapted into housing with commercial spaces at ground-floor level. A greater connection to the surrounding landscape is sought through layering and extension of the indoor/outdoor threshold. Generous double-height amenity spaces open the duplex flats out to the horizon, while Metsec partitions weave in and out of existing masonry crosswall structure, dividing interior spaces and forming a new façade to the street.

Tutor citation The re-use of any building is far more effective than removing and rebuilding it. By adding precise and effective layers where they will make a clear difference, both for the inhabitants and the working of the building, this project takes an ordinary and underutilised structure and reinvents its purpose. Michael Dillon

Newcastle University, School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape

Wing Yung Janet Tam (postgraduate)

Course MArch
Studio The Big Here and The Long Now
Project Re-establishing Bamboo in the Industrial Era

Project description Bamboo is a zero-waste material, good carbon capturer and decomposes naturally at the end of its life. Despite efforts made to fit bamboo into current construction industries by developing it into engineered bamboo products, it is still considered just an alternative to timber. Often it is difficult to identify the overly-processed final material as bamboo because it is so far removed from its original form. Each material deserves its own design, tailored to its properties. Therefore, this project aims to change people’s perception by offering a new tactile experience, while reintroducing this traditional material. Looking at bamboo’s current supply logistics, transportation accounts for the main contribution to its carbon footprint. So the principal challenge is to use living bamboo plants – growing the material on-site, without harvesting. The project proposes a series of interventions and structures that are grown and used according to bamboo’s natural growth cycle of 30 years.

Tutor citation The project exceeds the brief’s expectations, delivering a comprehensive study of the sustainable and design possibilities of using bamboo in the building industry. It is thoroughly researched, rigorously developed, and exquisitely presented. It shows an excellent degree of sensitivity toward materiality, detailing and spatial experience, demonstrating a thorough integration of design with environmental strategies. John Kinsley

University College London, The Bartlett School of Architecture

Daniel Pope (postgraduate)

Course MArch
Unit PG16: A Stationary Body
Project The Earthen Land Registry

Project description This project explores how the use of London clay can transition into contemporary construction. Augmenting traditional brick extrusion techniques and adopting emerging processes of additive manufacturing technology with clay, a series of interventions aims to heighten the sensuous and tactile relationship between the body and the materials of our built environment. The project critiques the flow of London clay from city to landfill as a waste product of civil engineering and basement excavations. It proposes an alternative use for building a new housing type and a retrofit strategy for existing stock. A tailored ‘earthen blanket’ is proposed to insulate brick homes. It honours the material’s heritage, maintains vapour permeability and can be adopted en masse to upgrade the UK’s draughty housing.

Tutor citation This project aims to address, in an imaginative, original and practical way, several critical problems that currently surround sustainable practices in our construction industry, directing its research to one material that London identifies with the most: London clay. This is an extremely relevant, inventive and thought-provoking project that asks us to consider a new streetscape for London that is sculptural, tactile and driven. Ana Monrabal-Cook

University of Cambridge, Department of Architecture

Helena Jordan (postgraduate)

Course MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design
Project Developing the Dearne (Dearne Valley, South Yorkshire)

Project description Developing the Dearne reconceptualises the city-regional spatial development from a bioregional perspective, offering an alternative framework for the valley’s post-industrial coal mining area. Speculating how to reconnect the valley to its sustainable history while promoting self-reliance, this project reinforces industrial hemp as a rotation crop and reterritorialises the private agricultural landscape toward a Community Land Trust. These multi-scalar proposals are tied together with a Centre for Sustainable Construction – a renewable construction trade school and carbon-negative hempcrete production facility. This is a linear building that links urban to rural and empowers residents with skills and materials to expand the townscape. The construction logic of the main structures, as well as the proposed retrofits carried out by the centre, draws from a knowledge of resources, supply chains and overall aims to disperse sustainable industries into peripheral areas as a way of dismantling central government’s city-centrist ‘green recovery’ policies.

Tutor citation Helena’s project combines thorough analysis of bioregional ideas with radical proposals that are implemented across a range of scales. The project’s breadth of evidence and its dexterity and precision reflect a sophisticated awareness of socio-political and environmental issues relating to the Dearne Valley specifically, and the question of how to stitch together fragmented post-industrial landscapes more generally. Ingrid Schröder

University of East London, School of Architecture, Computing and Engineering

Paulius Vaizgenis (postgraduate)

Course MArch
Unit 8 – Skopje: What’s next?
Project Resurrection of Forbidden and Omitted Environment

Project description The Royal Docks Waterfront has been privatised by large corporations, restricting access and views towards the water. Current development in Silvertown, east London, aims to reduce the amount of water in graving docks to create more land for living units, completely burying any historical context. In Newham, one of London’s most deprived boroughs, the project questions how we can bring people together, overcome obstacles, eliminate discrimination, and concentrate on tackling socio-economic disadvantages all at the same time. It aims to transform individuals through co-living, co-learning and co-working to disrupt current approaches to employment, housing and social care. The focus is on a green material community with systems dealing with noise pollution. The scheme uses natural, renewable and recyclable materials such as cork, allowing the community to take an active role in the circular economy. Part of the project is dedicated to experimental self-built modular living units. The living modules will apply systems developed on-site to act as real-life examples and provide experimental ground for further development.

Tutor citation The proposal aims to develop a sustainable community focusing on architectural systems that will deal with existing noise pollution issues caused by London City Airport, as well as improving the thermal performance of existing buildings. Armor Gutierrez Rivas

University of Liverpool, School of Architecture

Bentoon Boon-Itt, Ioana Bucuroiu, Tolulope Ogunjimi (postgraduates)

Course MArch
Module Thesis
Project Sustainable Urbanisation Bangkok

Project description Thailand is one of the countries most affected by climate change. Bangkok is recognised as Asia’s least green city, and paving over much of the capital has caused intense urban heat, disproportionately affecting the livelihoods of the city’s lower income groups. The site is a 926 x 504m plot of industrial land in central Bangkok. The proposal uses existing warehouses of the previous owner, the Tobacco Authority of Thailand, and introduces sustainable ecological industries such as sericulture and swiftlet birds’ nest farming. Street typologies found in the city have been reinterpreted within the warehouses to create spaces that are familiar and reflect how the city operates – such as adopting the metaphor of the forest canopy as the optimum sustainable environment for living beings. The wider complex allows nature to reclaim the site, reintroducing a variety of land types, such as forest, agricultural plots and wetlands.

Tutor citation This is a provocative proposition to arrest unsustainable urbanisation in Bangkok, based on a model of exclusionary zoning principles. The thesis develops a holistic approach for the appropriation of urban industrial sites by proposing an ingenious integration of the urban park with the activities of the urban informal economic sector and its associated training and support mechanisms. Soumyen Bandyopadhyay

University of Nottingham, Department of Architecture and Built Environment

Jessica Lawton (postgraduate)

Course MArch
Studio 1: Continuity
Project Advancing Brutalism: Transforming the Derby Assembly Rooms

Project description Brutalist buildings in the UK are under threat of mass demolition. The site is the Derby Assembly Rooms, completed in 1976 under Hugh Casson and an important Brutalist building which the city council has voted to demolish. The scheme proposes to retrofit it to 21st-century energy standards while enhancing its existing heritage and significance. The project documents the original building in the 1970s and in 2020, exploring how the existing spaces convey emotion and represent the ‘spirit’ of Brutalism. The study concludes with an assessment that informs design decisions, applying a strategy of preservation, restoration and intervention at different scales. The project upgrades the assembly rooms while opening the ground floor to connect to the public realm. Old and new are harmonised to create an improved version of the building’s original self.

Tutor citation This project challenges cultural assumptions in different ways: saving Brutalism, retrofit, timber cladding for important civic buildings and a design thesis that relies on construction details rather than visualisations for its key drawings. It demonstrates through a sensitive and beautifully drawn proposal how sustainability and cultural attitudes are intertwined. Tim Collett

University of Reading, School of Architecture

Harvey Warren (undergraduate)

Course BSc (Hons) Architecture
Studio Marlborough, Merlin, Morgan Le Fey
Project The Lambourn Valley MycoWorks and Centre for the Rehabilitation of Badgers

Project description The project reacts to the actions of radical nature-lovers secretly breeding endangered species to release into the wild across England, with a revival of badgers, stoats and otters. The M4 motorway creates a barrier to the spread of these reintroductions. The project considers earthworks created by people and badgers and has combined these in ways that include straw, cherry trees and fungi. Injured and orphan badgers are rehabilitated in the building and released into the woods. A badger ‘tunnel bridge’ crosses the M4. The buildings are woodland huts, built primarily from cob and mycelium, engaging with the landscape. The production of cherry wine is also an expression of the alchemy that is performed through collaboration between the three eukaryotic kingdoms: fungus, plant and animal. The project also collects and transforms fungi: mycelium is grown to form insulation, roofing and internal walls.

Tutor citation This project questions the status, relationships and interactions between several different forms of life, producing an array of social conditions with unusual, shared benefits and raising questions around our own status as other animals and organisms are enabled to become the primary drivers of change. Oliver Froome-Lewis

University of Strathclyde, Department of Architecture

Tiia Partanen (postgraduate)

Course MArch Advanced Architectural Design
Studio 02: Provocation, Art and Political Space
Project The Cloud Cooperative

Project description The infrastructure of the internet is growing ever larger, consuming more resources, drawing closer to our cities – and thus must be re‑evaluated and managed. The Cloud Cooperative is designed in three phases of data storage technology, each less energy-intensive than the last. The first, powered by a new tidal power plant, consists of traditional servers plugged into a district heating scheme using the heat generated by data processing to heat homes. The second phase introduces a passive cooling method, with data servers submerged deep in the waters of the Firth of Forth and occasionally lifted for maintenance by floating data rigs. These maintenance platforms will be built using repurposed oil-rig components and are designed for disassembly. The final phase will introduce an entirely emission-free data storage method with data laser-engraved in a 3D matrix inside cubes of quartz glass.

Tutor citation Tiia has considered the local and global impact of data storage, examining how this might holistically become sustainable through both its organisation, social structure and physical architecture and technology. The proposal offers an optimistic vision in which the impact of the information we produce can also be lessened through good design and shows the multiple benefits of community ownership on making these industries more accountable. Lizzie Smith