RIBA names this year’s best student architecture projects

Students from The Bartlett School of Architecture and Cambridge University have won RIBA 2022 President’s Medals after the biggest number of entries in the 186-year history of the awards programme.

The Bartlett’s Annabelle Tan won the Silver Medal for the best design project produced by a RIBA Part II student or equivalent for her A Journey through Past, Present and Post-Tropicality study.

Tan’s project is an investigation into notions of “tropicality” in the context of Singapore. Her scheme is a 4.2 km “socio-ecological continuum” that links a threatened forest to a national nature reserve. It includes housing, educational spaces, and areas for civic engagement made from regenerative materials produced along the site.

Tan also won the RIBA Dissertation Medal and the Part II RIBA Award for Sustainable Design for the project.

Cambridge student Mary Holmes won the bronze medal, which recognises the best design project produced at RIBA Part I, for her Out of the Closet, Into the Garden project.

It proposes the “queering and retrofitting” of two rows of terraced houses in the heart of a suburb in Harlow to create an enduring queer space that could serve as an almshouse for older people.

Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture student Inka Eismar won the Part I RIBA Award for Sustainable Design for her Common Ground | Leith project.

The Serjeant Awards for Excellence in Drawing went to Falmouth University’s Nathan Tipping-Stevenson, for Leow Keskorra ha Dyski: A Place to Assemble and Learn, and Manchester School of Architecture’s Nadir Qazim Mahmood, for Nirvana.

RIBA president Simon Allford said this year’s record 345 President’s Medals entries – which came from students at 100 different architecture schools in 27 countries – addressed contemporary topics with “immense” social and environmental significance.

“As ever the range, scope and scale of their inquiry is extremely impressive,” he said.

“Congratulations to the winners and thank you to the tutors and schools of architecture who have fostered and encouraged such promising minds.

“I look forward to seeing how they develop these speculations on architecture and life in the years to come.

“We have been running these awards for many decades and opened them up to the wider world of non-validated schools when I was VP for education over a decade ago.

“As well as being a celebration of this year’s student preoccupations, the work now adds to our quite extraordinary archive of a long history of student inquiry.

“On a personal note, I fondly remember awaiting the result of our Silver Medal nominated project with my partners at AHMM over 30 years ago – we were unplaced but of course we consoled ourselves with the fact we were involved!”