RIBA announces the 2017 President's Medal student winners

Established in 1836, the RIBA President's Medals recognize outstanding architectural research and study around the world. Along with the announcement of the Research winners and Research Medalist, the student winners were revealed today. Out of 373 architecture schools that RIBA invited, 293 design projects and dissertations from 97 schools in 34 countries were submitted — the highest number of entries in the competition's history.

During today's ceremony in London, RIBA revealed the student winners for the Silver and Bronze Medals, the Dissertation Medal, the Serjeant Awards for Excellence in Drawing, and the SOM Foundation UK Fellowships. The Silver Medal went to Daniel Hall of The Cooper Union (tutored by Lauren Kogod and Mersiha Veledar) for his project “Cycles of Toolmaking: An Optic, Tactile, Haptic, Material, Scalar and Pedagogic Study”, which focuses on the town of Mashiko, Japan. It was the first time The Cooper Union entered the competition.

Check out the winning projects below.

The Silver Medal winner (for best Part 2 design project): Daniel Hall (The Cooper Union, New York, USA), tutored by Lauren Kogod and Mersiha Veledar
Project: “Cycles of Toolmaking: An Optic, Tactile, Haptic, Material, Scalar and Pedagogic Study”

Project summary: “Sited in the ceramic town of Mashiko, Japan, the project proposes a place for learning which responds to the attitudes towards land use, extraction of clay, ceramic craft, agriculture, and water infrastructure, to replace a school damaged in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake.”

Silver Medal commendations:

Danielle Fountain (De Montfort University) for ‘The House of Ambiguity: Constructing Fictional Space’

Tom Hewitt (Northumbria University) for ‘Landhaus: Walking the Landscape as Design Practice’

Ivo Tedbury (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL), for ‘Semblr’

The Bronze Medal winner (for best Part 1 design project): Kangli Zheng (University of Nottingham), tutored by Alison Davies
Project: ‘Castle in the Sky’

Project summary: “The project is a response to London’s housing crisis, proposing an alternative model: flexible room boxes plugged into the available space above London’s terraces. In these communities in the sky, the space is defined by its occupants, who can replace and customise architectural typologies such as residential homes, co-housing spaces, storage properties, and shared public gardens. This is the first time that a student at the University of Nottingham has received an RIBA Medal.”

Bronze High Commendation: Luca Garoli (Queen’s University Belfast) for ‘Innovate to Conserve: Whiskey Distillery in Ballycastle’

Bronze Medal Commendations:

Gabriel Beard (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL) for ‘Ascaya City Hall: Constructing a Virtual Civic Image’

Shi Yin Ling (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL) for ‘Seasonal Dense(cities) – Living Garden Typologies for Future London’)

RIBA Dissertation Medal winner: Rhiain Bower (University of Westminster) for ‘Baricsio: The Slate Quarrymen’s Barracks in North West Wales’, tutored by Harry Charrington

Project summary: “This study of 19th century barrack dwelling for slate quarrymen in North-West Wales documents the physical structures, collating fieldwork and archival data, and the wider social sphere through newspapers, poetry and accounts of social history.”

Dissertation Medal Commendations:

Christopher Rogers (RIBA Studio) for ‘Architecture in Uniform: PSTD Prevention in Military Architecture’

Naomi Rubbra (Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture) for ‘Building Resilient Communities in NYC: Rethinking Gentrification and the Role of the Architect’

Rory Sherlock (Architectural Association) for ‘Multimedia Oblivion – Palmyra: Violence, erasure and the corporeal architectural body’

Serjeant Awards for Excellence in Drawing:

RIBA Part 1 winner: Gabriel Beard (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL) for ‘Ascaya City Hall: Constructing a Virtual Civic Image’

Project summary: “The Ascaya City Hall provides a civic center for a gated community just outside Las Vegas. Responding to the history of exaggerated neoclassical architecture used in American municipal buildings, virtual reality technology is used to propose a new way of experiencing civic architecture. informed by research of movement techniques in VR and a comparison between historical murals and contemporary virtual space, visitors experience an architecture where space and image merge.”

Serjeant Awards for Excellence in Drawing RIBA Part 2 winner: Thomas Parker (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL) for ‘An Architecture of Lumetric Causality’

Project summary: “The Architecture of Lumetric Causality investigates the potential of aesthetically generated realities in architecture. Through iterative deployment of generative film, physical modelling, digital scripting and analogue drawing ,these methodologies reveal a series of uncanny tangible worlds to explore. Through the programmatic design of a Lost and Found upon Willow Island, in Munich, Germany, these variable translations of narrative, programme and context tease out a series of spatial complexities.”

2017 SOM Foundation Fellowships UK winners:

RIBA Part 1- Andrei-Ciprian Cojocaru (University of Greenwich) for ‘24 Hour Soho Entertainment Centre’

RIBA Part 2 - Andres Souto (Royal College of Art) for ‘The Aesthetics of Hope & The Newest Basilica of Guadalupe”

Commendations: Luca Garoli (Queen’s University Belfast) and Claire Longridge (Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture)

You can find more of this year's entries here.