AJ Student Prize Sustainability Award 2022 – the shortlist

The current generation of architecture students is demanding climate-ready skills. The record number of entries from 45 schools for the AJ Student Prize’s Sustainability Award (now in its fourth year) is an encouraging sign that architecture schools, or at least individual studios, are increasingly responding to students’ call for action.

This year more projects are exploring the potential of regenerative materials such as lichen, chalk, algae and seaweed, as well as grappling with regional issues of ecology and biodiversity, such as peat reclamation and methane upcycling. While retrofit and circular economy projects remain few, they are increasingly complex and nuanced.

 

Michelle Gartside, postgraduate, Birmingham School of Architecture and Design

Source:Michelle Gartside

Course MArch
Studio/unit brief Extinction Rebellion Architecture (ERA)
Project title Lichenisation: A Communal Remedy

Project description This project investigates ways to rethink Dudley’s High Street. Based in the town, it occupies an existing building by adding Passivhaus structures to create an activity hub of skill-sharing, socialisation, and environmental education. Lichen is incorporated as a way of caring for the environment – a system that can help sequester carbon dioxide and is a natural indicator of the presence of pollution. All the proposed buildings offer varying façade materials to help contribute to the cultivation, protection and dispersion of species in the area. Activities within the building include creating panels to promote growth across the area, dyeing with lichen, printmaking, pottery, fine art and age-old crafts. Overall, this scheme sets out a vision for a future architecture in which urban environments are conceived as havens for wildlife and its built infrastructure is the scaffolding for increasing biodiversity.

 

Jonathan Edwards, postgraduate, Leicester School of Architecture

Source:Jonathan Edwards

Course MArch
Studio/unit brief States of Urbanicity (Unit 2)
Project title Lost Wales: Reviving Porth Wen

Project description Looking to Wales’s industrial past, this project attempts to repurpose an abandoned brickworks on Anglesey to create a hub for seaweed bio-energy production to help accelerate the UK’s transition to sustainable power. It proposes that Britain should look to its coastal waters to create a new energy ecosystem using seaweed as a green economy that also empowers local communities with skills to revive their fragmented post-industrial landscapes. Within the brickworks, seaweed is grown and harvested both for energy and for products for the wellness industry (the scheme also includes a spa). The two programmes work in conjunction with each other: the power plant produces energy and hot water, while the spa funds research and creates a market for seaweed products to support the operations of the energy plant. This project can be scaled up to create other new hubs within ruins along Anglesey’s coast.

 

Karlis Kukainis, postgraduate, Mackintosh School of Architecture

Source:Karlis Kukainis

Course Diploma in Architecture
Studio/unit brief Glasgow, an ethical city? (Stage 5)
Project title The ‘Pre-Landfill’: Finding sustainability in modern heritage

Project description This project addresses the issue of waste and re-use in construction – a matter that must be addressed in the wider industry. Beginning with an investigation of the Yorkhill Hospital Estate in Glasgow, a masterplan for the area is designed and proceeds to demonstrate how components from buildings scheduled to be demolished within the wider city can be re-used in the redevelopment of the 1960s Queen Mother’s Hospital building and adjacent Laundry Building. The programme for the redeveloped buildings includes material research spaces, alongside community education and training facilities and a market space for transformed goods.

 

Morgan McGregor, postgraduate, London Metropolitan University School of Art, Architecture and Design

Source:Morgan McGregor

Course MArch
Studio/unit brief Loose Fit City (Unit 6)
Project title Hero Square: a (pro)TEST site

Project description The site is Loughborough Junction, where the introduction of a renewably sourced district heating system and civic square utilises an existing squatting group’s capacity to experiment. It also makes use of the massive slab block construction of Loughborough Estate, catalysing estate-wide loose-fit improvements. The power generated by the new ground source heat pump network is displayed in a new clocktower, designed as a community landmark on Hero Square. Fabric improvements are made to make this viable. These improvements will be based on a retrofit, filigree double-skin and existing thermal mass interaction strategy, carried out by self-builders and followed by contractor-led work, with varying typologies coming together to create a consolidated civic square at the centre of the scheme.

 

Felix Sagar, postgraduate, The Bartlett

Source:Felix Sagar

Course MArch
Studio/unit brief Forest City (PG Unit 12)
Project title The Chalk Works: Chalk-based Remediation, Renovation and Regeneration

Project description This project takes an ambitious approach to the regeneration of a disused industrial and quarry site in a sensitive, biodiverse location on the South Downs. It proposes the use of chalk tunnelling spoil from the Thames Tideway Tunnel, extracted from the same geological strata as the site, as the main construction material. In doing so, it establishes a regenerative construction resource system which is a direct counterpoint to the site’s extractive past use as cement works. Industrial chalk cob is used to retrofit a series of derelict industrial buildings. Overall the project aims to broaden our horizons in terms of the ability of sustainable architecture to deliver a reciprocal relationship between systems of land use, inhabitation, culture and industry.

 

Olivia Christodoulides, postgraduate, Canterbury School of Architecture

Source:Olivia Christodoulides

Course MArch
Studio/unit brief ARCHITECTURE CLIMATE ACTION (Studio SYN City 51ºN)
Project title The Peatland Archive

Project description Peatlands are one of the largest carbon sinks on the planet. However, long exploited for fuel and therefore drained, they have often become carbon sources, contributing substantially to man-made climate change. This project, based at Avalon Marshes, a degraded peatland area of the Somerset Levels, proposes a large-scale and long-term landscape remediation strategy aimed at transforming the area back to one that sequesters carbon and thrives in biodiversity, as well as providing facilities for visitors to appreciate the area’s natural beauty. Drain-blocking elements re-wet the land and double as substructures for elevated paths, footbridges and a series of architectural interventions, including peatland monitoring stations, archaeological shelters and lookout towers. These interventions improve the accessibility of the landscape for visitors and expose archaeological findings that evidence millennia of human inhabitation in the marshes.

 

Lara Miller, postgraduate, University of Bath Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering

Source:Lara Miller

Course MArch
Studio/unit brief Design Studio 6.2
Project title Conalfan Algâu

Project description Conalfan Algâu is a centre for algae research and innovation sited in Cardiff, part of a proposed masterplan for the city after the Severn Estuary Barrage has been built. The project aspires to be a catalyst for rebuilding humankind’s relationship with nature, its goal being to influence change within this relationship by enabling the innovation that emerges when we appreciate and learn from nature. This building is the first of its kind in the UK and aims to draw in visitors by allowing them to explore the overlapping themes of research and nature. Starting with the story of laverbread, the design focuses on Wales’s cultural connections to the natural world, helping to ground the project in its surroundings by utilising the rich cultural connections within Cardiff’s marine life, while also considering the industrial heritage of the site. By embedding algae cultivation into the urban fabric, the project regenerates the process of urbanisation to become a defence mechanism against climate change.

 

Hadley Clarke, postgraduate, University of Cambridge Department of Architecture

Source:Hadley Clarke

Course MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design
Studio/unit brief N/A
Project title The Industrial Cooperative

Project description The Industrial Cooperative acts as a bridge between waste streams and industrial workers able to extract value from them, utilising spatial thinking across multiple scales to offer new habits and rituals surrounding disposal. The project takes as its starting point the owner of a chair deciding they no longer need it and that it can be disposed of. While the owner might still recognise value in the chair, a lack of clear and convenient spatial solutions means they cannot recognise the potential of that value. This is where the sequence of spaces managed by the Cooperative comes in, acting as a filter for waste streams, allowing the maximum amount of value to be recognised and realised, from individual value-identification in the initial sorting dock to automated storage in the vertical material banks. Each step of this new system plays a fundamental and practical role in saving waste from becoming obsolete, navigating it to where it is deemed most valuable.

 

Matthew Meeson, postgraduate, Manchester School of Architecture

Source:Matthew Meeson

Course MArch
Studio/unit brief Atelier Infrastructure Space
Project title The New Runrig/Localism & Historicism in Green Infrastructural Planning – Shetland as a Case Study

Project description This project, based on research into the problems of modern ‘greenwashed’ infrastructure, emphasises the importance of historic, low-tech solutions to environmental problems, small-scale interventions and the urgency of protecting nature. It proposes a new infrastructural system for Shetland – an archipelago rife with damaging development. Utilising wave power, the new system revolves around environmentally regenerative agroforestry and fish farming systems, merging the practices of ancient Shetland with aquacultural forms from Andean indigenous peoples. The new farming system brings food, employment, and richer soils to Shetland, while alongside it ancillary supportive industries are built within derelict croft houses. These include a food-waste composting and biogas production facility and a glass recycling plant using bags of waste glass to dam and restore peatland.

 

Elle Thompson and Ali Francis, postgraduate, University of Sheffield School of Architecture

Source:Elle Thompson and Ali Francis

Course MArch Collaborative Practice
Studio/unit brief Housing the Public
Project title Re-Housing Manchester

Project description This project proposes the creative re-use of the University of Manchester’s former UMIST Campus as an environmentally conscious form of inner-city living. The campus masterplan proposes turning teaching buildings into housing co-operatives sitting above community functions operated by the Carbon Conscious Collective. The Renold Co-op is the first phase, introducing a primary school at podium level and utilising the larger spaces of former lecture halls. Above, the repeating floor plates of the tower offer the flexibility for self-build cassette construction, designed for adaptation and disassembly and enabling lifetime homes and opportunities for material re-use. The project offers a three-point consideration of carbon: embodied, operational and life-cycle. A ‘traffic light’ assessment of elements guides every decision, evaluating embodied carbon against operational performance, with any upgrade considered against a material’s potential for re-use, repurposing or recycling.

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