Revealed: winners of the 2024 AJ Student Prize

This year’s winners were revealed at an event held last night (Thursday 3 October) at Sheppard Robson’s offices in Camden.

Just before the summer, every RIBA and ARB-accredited school across the UK was invited to nominate students for the seventh annual AJ Student Prize, which celebrates final-year students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

The 2024 prize was assessed by a jury consisting of returning judge Betty Owoo of the Greater London Authority, Sally Lewis of Stitch Architects, Craig Robertson of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris and Derin Fadina of Barr Gazetas. The session was chaired by AJ technical editor and deputy architecture editor Fran Williams.

All the winning projects emphasised play or current socio-environmental issues.

The undergraduate category was tightly contested with Hosea Cheung of Oxford Brookes University taking the top prize for Above Beside Below: Fallen Tree Upcycling Centre.

Centred around the topical environmental issue of climate resilience and tree loss, the project repurposes fallen trees into treasurable everyday consumables in an ambitious programme that includes timber workshops, an auction house and an educational centre with tree nursery.

The judges deemed the thesis project a ‘compelling idea’ which addresses both economic and environmental issues successfully on a ‘scale that was technically ambitious’. They loved the idea of the brief and were very impressed by the presentation of ideas. ‘It felt very mature,’ they said. ‘It’s a really solid piece of work.’

University of Edinburgh Part I Jessica Zhan was highly commended for her ‘play’-focused project Let’s Play: Leith Civic Centre and Social Housing.

A toy library and outdoor playground with social housing above, the scheme incorporates play throughout, from the style of drawing to the way the housing is ‘dressed’. The judges praised this project for its ‘uniform playful approach’. They thought the project demonstrated ‘a real rigour and understanding in terms of whole-life carbon, material choices and circular economy’.

In the postgraduate category, Connie Pidsley of the London School of Architecture was also highly commended. Her project Towards Regenerative Dwelling, readdresses extractive construction, material and housing ‘practice’ by proposing infill housing for a housing estate local to the school.

The judges particularly enjoyed her overlay drawings – inspired by Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till’s famous kitchen table drawing – saying it was great to see ‘the human side of housing portrayed in a portfolio show piece’.

Finally, a unanimous decision was made to award the postgraduate prize to an entirely hand-drawn project – Beyond the School Gates: The High Street School – by Part 2 student Jakob Young from the University of Strathclyde.

Deemed ‘incredibly joyous’ by the jury, this project envisions educational spaces as a communal asset through the concept of splitting a school along a high street. It takes the form of a school bus, retrofitted former shop unit, modular pavilions and a ‘caretaker’s factory’. The judges thought the careful, colourful drawings were ‘totally brilliant’ and the socioeconomic programme ‘rigorous and fantastic’ – yet ‘all done with humour’.

As always, the free-to-enter AJ Student Prize, sponsored by Marley, is a great platform to celebrate and support the work of both architecture students and universities across the UK, as the new generation of built-environment professionals emerges.

This year, the AJ has dropped the Sustainability Prize, partly because it expected and encouraged all entries to address issues of the climate crisis and social sustainability.

Over 100 nominations were received, ranging from addressing operational carbon reduction with rigorous technical interventions to tackling embodied carbon through more nuanced material explorations. Seaweed, mycelium and even slime mould all make an appearance as alternative solutions.

There are projects that blur the boundaries between artificial intelligence and gaming, and flit between past, present and future to project utopian, dream-like visions of an alternative world.

Elsewhere, there are eco-futuristic community hubs hewn from and nestled within precarious landscapes, promoting radical forms of regenerative design and human-to-non-human cohabitation.

All entries are available to view online for free, with each including the student’s description of their project, plus a short citation from their tutors. The entries are listed alphabetically by university name alongside key data from each school.

AJ Student Prize is sponsored by