The Architects’ Journal Architecture News & Buildings
Bennetts Associates, ECD Architects, Hawkins\Brown, Haworth Tompkins, HTA Design and Perkins&Will have been named as the inaugural AJ100 Champions.
The new title for 2024 recognises the AJ’s top pick of firms driving positive change, either in their own projects and working practices, or in the wider industry and beyond.
Between them, the six Champions make up the shortlist for the AJ100 Practice of the Year 2024.
A strong theme uniting the first Champions’ cohort has been a commitment to sustainability.
Last year, Bennetts Associates launched its anti-greenwash charter, Tell the Truth: a campaign for honesty in the built environment, to improve clarity around sustainability terminology such as ‘operational and embodied carbon’, ‘net zero’, ‘low energy’, and ‘sustainable’.
The practice is also designing a mass timber office for Related Argent, and has developed the use of subsoil as earth blocks.
ECD Architects has demonstrated a clear commitment to housing retrofit; the practice is currently retrofitting more than 10,000 homes in the UK and running trial projects on how mortgage products for banks could be informed by deep retrofit.
A quarter of ECD staff are now Passivhaus-trained designers, while the firm’s joint head of sustainability, Loreana Padron, is the main author of the Retrofit Academy’s retrofit designer course.
Perkins&Will’s recent fit-outs for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and legal client Squire Patton Boggs have demonstrated the firm’s commitment to circular economy principles.
The latter project involved re-using the majority of components from a short term fit-out in the firm’s new premises.
Hawkins\Brown is currently participating in STEAM, a three-year research project funded by the European Union Horizon Programme which aims to integrate the Arts into STEM subject pedagogies of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
Hawkins\Brown is also shortlisted in both the Sustainability Leader and Sustainability Initiative categories, the latter for the first school in the UK to meet the Department for Education’s Gen Zero specification, and for the AJ100 Employer of the Year category.
HTA Design, AJ100 Employer of the Year for the last two years, has once again impressed AJ100 judges with its commitment to outreach and post-occupancy evaluation.
Its recent College Road project in Croydon, a modular tower rising 163m, was the first project to be approved under the GLA’s new co-living asset class policy.
Haworth Tompkins, which won the Practice of the Year category in both 2020 and 2022, was chosen as a Champion for its all-round excellence – including delivery of the UK’s first multistorey light-industrial project, Industria.
Designed for Be First in Barking and Dagenham, the facility is a move away from the customary low-density shed typology.
The winners of the AJ100 awards will be announced in June.
AJ100 Practice of the Year 2024 Champions
- Bennetts Associates
- ECD Architects
- Hawkins\Brown
- Haworth Tompkins
- HTA Design
- Perkins&Will
