AJ Student Prize 2024: University of Central Lancashire

About

Undergraduate

Samuel Caldwell

Course BSc (Hons) Architecture
Studio/unit brief Inter_Generationality
Project title The City in the City: Venice an Anthropological Archipelago

Project description This project aims to reduce the pressure of the cost-of-living crisis for Venice’s pensioners. It’s a community centre that doubles up as a hub for urban farming on Venice’s Giudecca Island – historically known for its food production. The site is a former industrial site with existing structures, including Gino Valle’s 1984 social housing scheme and the former Stucky flour mill. An existing warehouse has been adapted to become the main collective space through the installation of a large piece of CLT furniture, designed to lightly touch the interior. Two monoliths reference an existing chimney and provide spaces for contemplation. The project represents space being reclaimed by the community, as inspired by Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas’s 1977 manifesto The City in the City: Berlin a Green Archipelago.

Tutor citation What Samuel’s project provides is carefully controlled across all scales of imagination, the city, community and place. A comprehensive set of information, collage, drawings, models and renders communicates this ambition with confident clarity. Chris Lowry, Ürün Kiliç Engasa, Sam Eadington

Postgraduate

Burhanuddin Nawab

Course MArch Architecture
Studio/unit brief Other People’s Dreams
Project title Homes for People, Not for Profit

Project description Cottam, on the edge of Preston, has been expanded in the past 30 years by mass housebuilders. The growing residential area is marked by the mass production of standardised homes with basic construction and uniform typologies, which are lacking in social, economic and cultural amenities. This project sees 100 families, who have become tired of living in sub-par homes, combining their financial resources to purchase land next to the development. In search of individuality, the group creates an architectural infrastructure. Initially using reclaimed construction waste, natural materials – such as trees, flax, straw and hemp – are then grown and harvested for future housing. Workshops and fabrication spaces emerge as a new form of civic infrastructure at a hyper-local level.

Tutor citation This project works in a context that is often ignored by mainstream practice and academic discourse: it appreciates that large parts of our population desire to lead a suburban existence on the periphery of the urban condition. Lee Ivett, Lizzie Smith