RIBA announces 2018 President's Medal student recipients

Today, RIBA announced the student recipients of the 2018 President's Medals in recognition for their outstanding architectural research and study. This year reeled in 328 design projects and dissertations from 101 architecture schools in 37 countries, the highest number of entries in the award's history since it was established in 1836.

“The breadth and scale of talent evidenced in the design proposals and writings produced by this year’s winners is truly remarkable. This is an emerging generation of skilled thinkers who are able to distill complex ideas and resolve them into sophisticated architectural proposals. They are all talents to watch,” RIBA President Ben Derbyshire said in a statement.

Additionally, the winners of the RIBA President’s Awards for Research and the RIBA Research Medal were announced today.

The President’s Medals exhibition will be open at the RIBA's London headquarters starting December 5 through February 15, 2019 before it tours the UK and abroad.

Here's a glimpse of the winning projects.

RIBA Silver Medal (for the best design project produced at RIBA Part 2 or equivalent): Sonia Magdziarz | Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
Project: “How to Carve a Giant”
Tutors: Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite, and Keiichi Matsuda

Project excerpt: “‘How to Carve a Giant’ proposes an architecture capable of keeping safe contemporary forms of knowledge. It takes a mantle of a folk story, that carves its way through the urban fabric of Pasila, Helsinki. The building is a repository that stores knowledge in a vast inter-generational bid to prevent the historic loss of information. The project considers how digital preservation made possible via DNA encoding has rendered knowledge invisible to the naked eye. That consequently posits architecture as decipherer and uses ornament, inscription, shifts in scale and an architectural language native to Finland to facilitate the dialogue...”

Silver Medal Commendations

Sam Coulton (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL) for ‘London Physic Gardens: A New Necropolis’ 

Kevin Herhusky (California Polytechnic State University) for ‘Infrastructures of Memory, Phygital Bodies in a Concrete Cloud’ 

Ruth McNickle (Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture) for ‘Tilling the Prado: A Furrow of Re-Construction’

RIBA Bronze Medal winner (for the best design project produced at RIBA Part 1 or equivalent): Justin Bean | University of Bath 
Project: “Dreaming of Electric Sheep”
Tutors: Martin Gledhill and Frank Lyons

Project excerpt: “...This project is a hotel, situated within an electrical substation. An ordinary program in the presence of the extraordinary, seeking to ask questions about how living alongside technology affects our everyday lives, and our relationship with each other. A hotel is based upon serviced opulence where the routine acts of eating, sleeping and washing are heightened to be extraordinary. Technology is entwined into our everyday and the hotel offers an opportunity to put the banal in the forefront of the conversation so we can assess the extent of our everyday relationship with the machine.This project represents my hope for a more open relationship with technology in the future...”

Bronze Medal Commendations

Alexander Wilford (University of Greenwich) for ‘Smithfield Lorry Depot’ 

Camille Bongard (Architectural Association) for ‘A Choreographed Timeline, Rewriting RIBA Building Contract’ 

Sam Beattie (University of Nottingham) for ‘A Bridge to Wellness’

RIBA Dissertation Medal: Rosemary Milne | Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture
Project: “Species of Nooks and Other Niches”

Project excerpt: “The nook is a niche in architectural thought. Due to its inherent obscurities and inefficiencies, the nook is becoming an endangered species of space, neglected in favour of efficiencies, transparencies, and orders of succession tending towards architectural reductionism -an order which forms the basis of the nook’s antithetical counterpart: the nake. The dissertation seeks out a different kind of order, excavating the nature of the nook in all its complexity and intensity and emphasising its necessity and continued relevance for architectural practice and thought...”

Dissertation Medal Commendations

Ethan Loo (University of Sheffield) for ‘Reading the Past and the Faraway: Simulation, Meaning, and Macau’ 

Marie-Henriette Desmourès (London Metropolitan University) for ‘The Whole-body Seer: Blindness as Narrative, Subject and a Way of Seeing’ 

Mark Shtanov (University of Cambridge) for ‘Another Hotel in Africa: A New Prototype for a Community-Initiated, Phased West African Hotel Project with Attached Hospitality School, in Lekki, Nigeria’

Serjeant Awards for Excellence in Drawing: Camille Dunlop (RIBA Part 1, Bartlett School of Architecture)
Project: ‘Pipeline Hijacking’
Tutors: Jennifer Chen; Maren Klasing

Project excerpt: “‘Pipeline Hijacking’ is a case study for alternative means of dwelling and holistic building methods constrained by limited resources available in the age of the Anthropocene. In response to the Icelandic Housing Crisis, the project follows a speculative exaggeration of the current situation in Reykjavik, where residents are too readily forced out of the capital due to the influx of tourists and imagines how their dwellings could be informed by an existing infrastructure of a Geothermal Pipeline Network which supplies a constant stream of hot water. The proposed architecture is informed by the needs of the community and specific thermal conditions required in residential spaces....”

Serjeant Awards for Excellence in Drawing: Maria Marilia Lezou (RIBA Part 2, University of Greenwich)
Project: “Hotel Mollino: Staging Spaces of the Everyday as Heterotopias of Performance in Scenography and Architecture”
Tutors: Max Dewdne; David Hemingway

Project excerpt: “Scenography ha been explored as an ‘art of building’ and theatre productions as part of an architectural thinking. Henry Lefebvre’s The Critique of Everyday Life and the work of Carlo Mollino guided the project’s inspiration and the interrelation of the themes of architecture, scenography, and spectatorship. The project exists as a Hotel Set Model within a Garden House alongside Mollino's house that operates as his Archival Studio for past and future works. The project exists in two different occasions: A Hotel Set and a working set model, exploring the scalelessness and displacement of the model. The hotel signifies the exploration of spaces of temporary stay while critiquing the underplay of the ordinary. The extravagant, Mollino-influenced hotel design is aimed at revealing a staged, postmodern, interdisciplinary visual reading that presents cases of performative models as provocative constructions of present realities.”

SOM Foundation Fellowships UK recipients:

Grey Grierson (RIBA Part 1 at Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL)
Project: “Negotiation of States: A Crematorium and Columbarium in Hong Kong”

Margaret Ndungu (RIBA Part 2 at De Montfort University)
Project: “Wild City”