This year’s £10,000 award will be handed to team with best proposal for building homes in existing non-residential structures
Pollard Thomas Edwards, Tuckey Design Studio and the campaign to save Birmingham’s Ringway Centre are among 17 teams longlisted for this year’s Davidson Prize.
The brief for the fourth annual award, which has a top prize of £10,000, asked for teams to envisage how housing could be built in existing non-residential structures using sustainable materials.
Longlisted entries include low-carbon proposals to transform electricity pylons, a quarry, a vacant airport, a disused train station and former telephone exchanges into housing.
Flats built into the roof of a church, “flat-pack” homes inside an IKEA superstore and housing in repurposed farm buildings also made the list.
The proposals were selected by a judging panel chaired by Amandeep Singh Kalra, the associate director of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham’s regeneration company Be First.
The rest of the panel consists of Annalie Riches, co-founder of Stirling Prize-winning Mikhail Riches, Atelier Ten director Duncan Campbell, Elle Decoration UK design editor Alice Finney and Total Synergy commercial lead Miles Mitchell and Alex Turner, co-founder of last year’s winner Studio Mutt.
Riches said: “This year’s submissions showcase some incredible, forward-thinking solutions to solving the UK’s housing demand while helping to mitigate the significant impact the built environment has on climate change.
“From the reuse of pylons and gasholders to airport hangars and high-street shops, it is great to see such a wide variety of skillsets coming together to propose ideas that could have a genuine impact.”
Campbell said this year’s longlist demonstrated the diversity of ideas around the future of UK housing.
He added: “As an engineer focusing on sustainable solutions, it has been brilliant to see teams thinking creatively about regeneration and bringing nature back into urban and industrial settings through the use of clever design with exciting and interesting approaches to communicating their ideas.”
Save Smallbrook Ringway, the campaign group behind efforts to prevent plans to demolish the city’s brutalist Ringway Centre, has proposed turning the building into housing for the queer community.
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The entry comes two months after the campaign group lost a last-ditch legal challenge against Birmingham council’s decision to approve the Corstorphine & Wright-designed scheme, which would replace the building with three newbuild towers.
At the next judging stage, The Davidson Prize jury will shortlist three finalists who will each receive £5,000 to develop their design ideas and present a two-minute visual media presentation to the panel.
The longlisted and finalist projects will be showcased during the London Festival of Architecture on 19 June 2024, when the winner will be announced.
The public is invited to vote for its favourite project from the longlist here until 6pm on 29 April. The project with the most votes will be awarded the People’s Choice Award at the June event.
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