The AIA UK Chapter hosted the 2020 Excellence in Design Awards Gala on the 28th October as a virtual event. Disruptions due to the evolving pandemic extended the awards schedule, but despite the uncertainty and disruptions of the year we were pleased to receive a fabulous host of submissions and to celebrate the jury’s selection of outstanding projects with the community digitally.

The 2020 awards were chosen from three overarching categories: Professional, Emerging Practice and Sustainability, a new addition. Within these categories the jurors chose winners across a diverse range of scales and sectors.

The chapter extends thanks to our jury:

• Jane Duncan, Hon. FAIA, Jane Duncan Architects + Interiors

• Gerry O’Brien, AKT II Design Director

• Helen Newman,  Head of Sustainability at CBRE

• Christopher Musangi, AIA UK President

Our gratitude also goes to Portview, fit-out specialists, for their sponsorship of the 2020 Excellence in Design Awards.

Winners

Professional

Extra Large Project

Leeza Soho

ZHA

Leeza SOHO’s Beijing site is diagonally dissected by an underground subway service tunnel at the intersection of five new lines currently under construction on Beijing’s Subway network. Straddling this tunnel, the tower’s design divides its volume into two halves enclosed by a single facade. The space between these two halves extends the full height of the tower, creating the world’s tallest atrium at 194m, which rotates as the tower rises to realign the upper floors with Lize road to the north.

Large Projects

One Fen Court

Eric Parry Architects

One Fen Court is located at the heart of London’s insurance district. Constructed at the scale of a city block, it provides 41,000sqm of open and expansive floor space over 16 levels.  A new publicly accessible 2,200sqm roof garden called The Garden at 120 crowns the development.  The new building brings civic presence and an increase in the public realm of the City of London. It also brings colour. The use of Dichroic banding on ‘The Crown’ and two-tone metal finishes to the lower level brise soleil brings an ever changing kinetic colour palette to the building when seen from the street or the greater canvas of the cityscape.

Zayed Centre for Research into Rare Disease in Children

Stanton Williams

The Zayed Centre for Research into Rare Disease in Children reimagines the healthcare environment as an engaging civic experience in the heart of London. Designed for Great Ormond Street Hospital and University College London, the 13,000sqm facility combines pioneering translational research with clinical care and is the first purpose-built paediatric centre of its kind in the world.

Medium Projects

St Paul's School - General Teaching Building

Walters & Cohen Architects

The client’s intention was to create a new general teaching building fit for 21st century education that responds to the ethos of the school. The library has a  calming and inspiring view across the Thames and the timber cladding gives a warm, welcoming and traditional atmosphere. Founder’s Court is designed to allow clear and easy circulation while being an enjoyable and useful space for pupils to linger. The breakout spaces, Atrium and Founder’s Court have been an instant hit with students and staff. The ‘regular but random’ patterns of the facade bring light and ventilation into the building. The client has described the school as ‘great, not grand’, and the concrete here is elegant and beautiful while remaining simple and functional.

English National Ballet

Glenn Howells Architects

A transformational project for English National Ballet who have relocated to this purpose built 93,000 sq ft ‘dance factory’ in East London. The new building significantly expands their accommodation by providing eight new rehearsal spaces, one of which has full stage rigging facilities. The design of the building opens up the activities of ENB to the public through the incorporation of large windows onto public spaces. The main challenge was providing the required range of flexible, state-of-the-art facilities on a narrow site and with a challenging budget. The design team achieved this by creating something that is elegant, pared-back, beautiful but also hard working; its character is defined by a celebration of exposed raw materials such as concrete ceilings and translucent glass walls.

Carnaby Court

Rolfe Judd

A place to shop, a place to work, a place to eat and a place to live all within the context of the historic, vibrant heart of The Carnaby Estate in Soho. Inspiration for the street elevation design was taken from the historic use in Soho of glazed tiles. A combination of glazed French lava stone and brick were used to form a series of layered frames within each façade.

Small Project

Cork House

CSK Architects with the Bartlett UCL

Cork House in is the result of a holistic approach that connects the architectural to the ecological – the way it looks and feels is an expression of every stage of its life cycle, from the biodiverse cork forests right through to the potential for disassembly at the end of its very long life.

Sustainability

Large Project

National Automotive Innovation Centre - Cullinan Studio

The National Automotive Innovation Centre (NAIC) at University of Warwick is one of the largest research and development centres of its kind in Europe, housing up to 1,000 staff under one of the largest timber roofs in the world. The NAIC co-locates industry and academia, and aims to be a crucible for innovation towards the future of mobility, vital to the paradigm shift taking place across transport and the built environment in response to climate change. Internally, layered, day-lit meeting and movement spaces over large halls create a terraced landscape of shared workspace. Externally, the NAIC engages with the university campus with transparent ground floors showcasing the activities inside and an intensive sequence of landscaped edges and water channels. Between the ground floor and timber roof, an undulating mesh façade acts as a veil to direct sunlight whilst creating shifting patterns of light and shade.

Small Project

Cork House

CSK Architects with the Bartlett UCL

Internally the exposed cork captures light and shadow and creates an evocative sensory environment. It is gentle to the touch with a soft acoustic and a smoky aroma. All 1,268 blocks of expanded cork are prefabricated off site, and assembled on site by hand without mortar or glue, like an oversized organic Lego® system.  As a result, the whole house is designed for disassembly, so that in the distant future the pure cork can be re-used, recycled or returned to the biosphere to generate new growth.

Emerging Practice

Large Project

Chongqing Industrial Museum

WallaceLiu

This new museum of industrial history has been created amongst the remaining structures of an impressive steel works in the city of Chongqing, China. Enclosed exhibition spaces are lifted off the ground and nested within the skeleton of the old beams and columns to create a permeable ground floor, a labyrinth of open space, alternatively covered or uncovered, that culminates in a large open hall organising the building from the centre of its plan. The raised volumes that contain a composed exhibition narrative are linked by bridges at different levels where visitors are cyclically returned, through glimpses and framings, to the experience of the factory sheds. Wrapped in a pleated and perforated aluminium curtain, the building forms a flexible, blurred boundary with the epic landscape and industrial ruins of the historic factory site.

Medium Project

Ditton Hill House - Surman Weston

Ditton Hill House is a new-build house on a suburban street in Surbiton. With its pitched roof and pure white walls, it might at first glance seem at odds with its neighbours in this leafy district of west London. Inspired by the local vernacular the house borrows the language of mock-Tudor, turning it on its head by expressing it in a steel frame – the materiality of modernity. The inherent strength of the steel exoskeleton permitted a thinning of the structural steel, which helps to express the pitched form diagrammatically as if it were drawn by a child.

The house is designed to offer a range of spatial experiences from a triple-height entrance space to an intimate hallway and an expansive living room. Upstairs, bedrooms and bathrooms are housed within the “loft space”, which, at five metres in height and primarily lit from above, has an almost church-like peaceful quality.

Small Project

Nýp Guesthouse - Studio Bua

The Guesthouse Nýp at Skarðsströnd is situated in a former sheep farm overlooking the Breiðafjörður Bay Nature Reserve in western Iceland. Constructed in 1936, the building was deserted in the 1970s, falling into disrepair before the new owners began rebuilding in 2001. Since 2006, it has come to be known as a cultural hub, playing host to exhibitions, lectures, courses and workshops. Staying true to Nýp’s ethos of sustainability and slow tourism, a vernacular approach with a form based on local turf homes was taken. A gradual renovation that focused on restoring and reinterpreting historical features while making full use of local labour, techniques and materials such as stone-turf retaining walls and tiles handmade from local clay. Driftwood, salvaged from a neighbouring beach, has been used as columns to support the new floor. Steel handrails, timber doors and beams have been salvaged from building sites in Reykjavik old town.

Commendations

        Belle Vue - Morris + Company

        Energy Hub - Morris + Company 

        The Faithlie Centre - Moxon Architects

Shortlisted

        Beijing Daxing International Airport - ZHA

        Eton College - John Simpson Architects

        Niederhafen River Promenade - ZHA

        Salamander - Memalondon

        Town House, Kingston University - Grafton Architects

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