AIA UK 29th Annual Student Charrette: Shaping the Future of London’s Public Spaces Through Creative Collaboration

On 26 October 2024, the Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) gallery in London was transformed into a hub of creativity and collaboration for the 29th AIA UK Student Charrette. With over 70 Part 1 architecture students from 14 universities in attendance, the event embodied the power of participatory design to reshape public spaces for inclusivity, sustainability, and community vitality. Special thanks to KPF for sponsoring this year’s event and graciously opening their gallery space for the day, helping bring this ambitious vision to life.

The morning began with a warm breakfast reception, setting an inviting tone for the students, mentors, and jurors to connect and exchange ideas. Paolo Mendoza, AIA UK’s Emerging Professionals Director, then introduced this year’s brief, centered on “Empowering the Next Generation in Participatory Urban Design,” a call for future architects to contribute to London’s vibrant cultural landscape. Students were tasked with reimagining the Strand Aldwych area—a site steeped in history and cultural significance—as a dynamic public space. Their designs needed to respond to the area’s heritage while prioritizing sustainability, resilience, and inclusivity. The brief challenged students to embrace participatory urban design, encouraging them to create installations that engage the community in co-creating spaces that reflect their needs.

Equipped with cameras and notebooks, the teams embarked on a site visit, accompanied by their mentors, to observe and document the site’s physical and social dynamics. After returning to the KPF gallery, students launched into a 4.5-hour design sprint. During this phase, Martyn Corner from Hopkins Architects offered expert guidance on model-making techniques, helping teams refine their physical representations. Working within the constraints of an analogue, CAD-free charrette, the students produced hand-drawn plans, sketches, and physical models that expressed their vision and creativity.

As the design time concluded, the teams presented their proposals to a distinguished jury: Taylor Rogers from Hopkins Architects, Karla Montauti from Benoy, Samantha Cooke from KPF, and Mark Breeze from the Architectural Association. The jury commended the teams for their creative approaches and attention to the nuances of the site. Each team’s proposal demonstrated a clear understanding of the Strand Aldwych’s unique cultural and historical character, with compelling visual representations and thoughtful models. The jurors highlighted the inventive ways the students integrated public engagement into their designs, noting a range of inspiring ideas to make the space more accessible, inclusive, and interactive.

AIA UK Emerging Professionals Director, Paolo Mendoza with the 2024 Student Charrette jurors: Taylor Rogers (Hopkins Architects), Samantha Cooke (KPF), Karla Montauti (Benoy), and Mark Breeze (Architectural Association).

After a thorough and spirited deliberation, the jury awarded first place to Group 8, a team of students from the University of Westminster, University of Reading, and University of Dundee, mentored by Gregory Fonseca. Their proposal stood out for its seamless blend of community engagement, sustainability, and sensitivity to the site’s context. The 1st runner-up was awarded to Group 4, consisting of students from the University of Bath and London Metropolitan University and mentored by Francis Hur. The 2nd runner-up went to Group 2, which included students from the University of Greenwich and the University of Hertfordshire, guided by mentors Elizabeth Dailey and Bea Sennewald.

The winning team mentored by Gregory Fonseca, AIA: Students from the University of Westminster, University of Reading, and University of Dundee: Fiona Gyamfi, Maame Frimpong, Clevy Bento, Robert Timberlake, Sarah Tolba, Hristislava Arabadzhieva, Benjamin Hanyecz.

The 1st runner-up team mentored by Francis Hur, AIA: Students from the University of Bath and London Metropolitan University: Emma McCook, Aaron Horwood, Caroline Rodrigues, Henri Toniolo, Fabiane Lonardelli.

The 2nd runner-up team mentored by Elizabeth Dailey, AIA and Bea Sennewald, AIA, RIBA: Students from the University of Greenwich and University of Hertfordshire: Ermiona Rousi, Zaid Shanawaz, Idris Mooradun Aisha Hussain, Iraj Syeda, Luke Buckman, Cydney-Ellen Thorold, Sushant Gurung.

AIA UK extends heartfelt gratitude to the mentors who played an instrumental role in the charrette’s success. Their expertise and mentorship were essential in guiding students through each phase of the design process. The mentors included Pierre Baillargeon from Mixity Studio, Elizabeth Dailey from Pilbrow & Partners, Bryan Oknyansky from Studio Moren, Francis Hur from Francis Hur Architecture, Eric Beard-Sackett from Whitman, Requardt & Associates, Lucia Piccinini from Lucia Piccinini Architect, Alex Miller from KPF, Gregory Fonseca from Mobius Design, and Bea Sennewald from Article 25.

The creativity, vision, and dedication displayed by these students are incredibly inspiring. Their proposals not only respect the historical essence of the Strand Aldwych but also bring innovative ideas for a more inclusive, sustainable, and resilient future.

This charrette leaves a lasting impression on all involved, paving the way for a momentous 30th AIA UK Student Charrette in 2025, which promises to inspire and engage the next generation of architectural talent.

Written by Paolo Mendoza, Associate AIA

AIA RIBA Keynote Lecture

On November 1 st the annual Keynote Lecture was given by New York-based Thomas Phifer, FAIA. The lecture was co-hosted with the RIBA and was held at the RIBA’s headquarters in Portland Place, London. 

Thomas Phifer is known for his highly refined modernist designs and he is probably best known for several courthouses he has designed in the US including Salt Lake City and Long Island. His lecture however focused on 4 museum projects – the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Glenstone Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Using this combination of completed and in-progress projects Phifer explained his design philosophy which has a particular emphasis on light, volume, and form

AIA UK sponsor Schüco generously funded the evening. Please remember them for your next project. For more images of the evening, please visit our Facebook Page.

Lester Korzilius, FAIA RIBA

A Mid-Summer's Night Gala

This year’s ever popular AIA UK Summer Gala was held on 21st of June (mid-summer) in the enchanting conservatory terrace at the Barbican. The Mid-Summer Night’s theme, honouring the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare, echoed in the raffle prizes which included a themed experience at The Globe Theatre, London Eye tickets, furniture and many more generous donations from AIA UK sponsors. Prizes were entertainingly raffled this year, with sales proceeds supporting the work of the chapter.

Dinner was served a’la carte via “street food” stalls set up around the terrace and allowed guests to wander the gardens whilst enjoying their food and drinks. It was a rare beautiful day following a string of rainy days; the enclosed terrace must have insured against the rain. Guests enjoyed a beautiful sunset through the glazed interior, and were able to socialise with a wide variety of industry professionals.

Guests proclaimed the Gala a huge success. To improve upon it in the future, we would like to offer reduced entry tickets for emerging professionals, and invite guests from an even wider variety of professionals including developers and potential clients.

AIA UK STUDENT CHARRETTE 2015

On Saturday November 7th, 2015, AIA UK held its 21st annual Student Charrette – a juried, one-day design competition for UK students of architecture.

Kent School of Architecture students with mentor Francis Hur AIA

Taking place at the Zaha Hadid designed Roca London Galley, the Charrette gave students the opportunity to design collaboratively whilst being mentored by an experienced practising AIA UK architect.  The one-day event is intended to encourage students to work as a team and to represent their school or university. The competition, which is also open to individual students, took place in conjunction with the Roca London Gallery exhibition, Childhood Re-Collections: Memory in Design, featuring exhibits from Daniel Libeskind, Kengo Kuma, Zaha Hadid and others.

University of East London students with mentor Pierre Baillargeon AIA

“The AIA Student Charrette is an opportunity for architecture students from across the UK to work together in a fun, creative and competitive environment,” comments Robert Rhodes AIA, organiser of the Charrette, past 

 AIA UK President and current Zone 1 Director of the AIA International Region. “The Charrette is a cad-free event.  Students are required to produce only drawn, modelled or collaged presentations.  Students must rely on essential drawing and modelling skills to communicate their ideas and produce something substantial in a very limited time.  The event enables the tradition of the “charrette” as a friendly, productive competition to continue and gives participants something real to take away at the end of it.” 

University of East London students presenting to the jury

The annual competition is open to all second and third year students enrolled in any UK school of architecture. More than 50 students participated from universities from London, Liverpool, Sheffield and  around the UK. The theme this year was dubbed, “Interrupted Connections” and was focused on civic art, public space, way-finding and identity.  Groups were given the exercise of making sense of the neighborhood surrounding the Roca London Gallery, called the Chelsea Design Quarter.

The jury (R to L) Patrick Lynch, Nicholas Gilliland, Karin Templin

The wining team, mentored by AIA UK Director Bea Sennewald AIA, hailed from The University of the Creative Arts in Canterbury, Kent – with one student joining from University of Kingston (London). The competition was juried by an esteemed panel, chaired by architect and educator Patrick Lynch PhD RIBA (Lynch Architects, London).  Other jurors were Karin Templin, Design Fellow at University of Cambridge Faculty of Architecture and AIA CE member, Nicholas Gilliland AIA of Tolila + Gilliland Atelier d’Architecture (Paris).   

Winning Team University of the Creative Arts + Kingston presenting to jury

This year’s competition was made possible thanks to long-time AIA UK and AIA CE sponsor Laufen, and the generosity of the Roca London Gallery. 

Winners – University of the Creative Arts students, at the pub after the Charrette

Authors: Frederick Grier and Robert Rhodes

AIA UK 2015 KEYNOTE LECTURE

On November 3rd, the AIA UK Chapter in conjunction with RIBA re-launched the Annual AIA/RIBA Keynote Lecture. Since its inauguration, the AIA/RIBA Keynote Lecture series has brought renowned architects, including William Pedersen, Antoine Predock, Peter Eisenman, and Ricardo Legorreta, to the UK.

This year’s event, organized by Lester Korzilius, AIA, RIBA, and Amrita Raja, Assoc. AIA, took place at Jarvis Auditorium at the RIBA Headquarters, and featured a talk by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Their eponymous firm, TWBTA, is known for site-sensitive and well-crafted buildings, encompassing a wide range of types and geographies, from a single family residence in Long Island, NY, to a technology campus in Mumbai, India. Their work has received numerous awards and international recognition, most recently earning the RIBA International Fellowship (2014) and the AIA Architecture Firm Award (2013) - and even achieved infamy, when MoMA’s 2014 demolition of their much-loved American Folk Art Museum, less than 20 years after its completion, had the architectural community up in arms.

After introductions by Brianne Hamilton, AIA UK Chapter President, and Stephen Hodder, RIBA Past-President, to whom the AIA presented a Certificate of Appreciation for his support of our chapter, the architectural duo took the stage, leading the the audience on an introspective journey, from private residential interiors to significant cultural work.  Beginning with an investigation of their own New York apartment, Williams/Tsien expressed their growing interest in interiority and the effect of light on spatial perception.  In their early work, they discovered an affinity for the handmade, and for inverting relationships between the building and its natural context through the use of light and captured landscapes.  

During the second half of the lecture, Williams/Tsien presented their projects within this framework of light and interiority.  Of the many works shown, two stand as exemplary of their architectural ethos, the Cranbrook Natatorium and the Barnes Foundation.  Both projects generate their own interior landscape, kept hidden from the exterior, a surprise for guests to discover.  The Natatorium, engulfed by conifers, contains a jewel of a space, where above the pool, lightwells with operable roofs open up to bring the outdoors in, from rain to the scent of the adjacent forest.  Likewise, the Barnes’ stone exterior reveals nothing of the light-filled volumes within.  There, strict constraints required them to reproduce the collection’s existing sequence of rooms.  In inverting the concept of ‘gallery in a garden’ found in the collections original context, to ‘garden in a gallery’, Williams/Tsien inserted two voids within gaps in the visitor narrative. Each houses a meeting space connected to the landscape via a lightwell, creating a new interior context for the collection.

The duo’s camaraderie was evident on stage, as they took turns elaborating on the work and making a few choice ‘revisions’ to the other’s interpretation of events - generating a few laughs along the way.  The lecture concluded with a few questions from the audience, and the conversation continued in the adjacent room over glasses of wine. The evening was an inspirational insight into the work of two formidable architects.  Many thanks to Tod Williams and Billie Tsien for coming to London to share their exceptional work, and to the team at RIBA without whose hard work this event would not have been possible.   

Author: Amrita Raja

AIA UK 2015 Exellence in Design Awards, Noel Hill Travel Award

Arriving into a hot, humid, Cambodian day, we were greeted by our destination and the place to which we would call home for the next two months. Taking the day to adjust to the time and climate differences we talked over the project in preparation for work the next day.

Waking up in darkness began the early morning routine throughout the project. An ambitious two month time scale had been set to complete the build. Making our way to site which was located adjacent to where we were living in the slum we started work on foundations. To our surprise we found that the demolition company whom we had hired to demolish the existing concrete framed building on site had forgotten to tell us that they had not removed the foundations of the previously existing school the week before our arrival. Being unable to start our build without this job being completed, we hired an excavator on site to simultaneously dig our pad foundation whilst removing the foundations of the previous building. Whilst this was underway on site half of the team set to assembling the vast amount of steel reinforcement cages which had to be assembled for the foundations and full concrete structure.

tarting the second week we prepared for what would be our first experience of pouring concrete foundations by hand on a constrained site. Access to the site was limited. We anticipated that the ready mix concrete truck would not be able to squeeze up the tight dirt path to our site therefore we had to devise a way to procure the concrete on site. This came with the employment of two flat bed trucks and hundreds of recycled twenty five litre paint buckets. The buckets were filled individually in the flat beds at the bottom of the access path, transported to the top of the site where the use of a human chain would send them to the specific pad foundation. This process would repeat throughout the build and become a regular occurrence on each concrete pour. Completing the first concrete pour over two days, with a day of rain delay in-between, we were ready to start on the timber falsework which would support the pour of our main concrete structure.

Our main structure was to be poured in reinforced concrete using an unconventional formwork made from a geo-textile fabric. By using a fabric formwork we saved ourselves an extensive amount of timber, this was beneficial for the build due to the lack of sustainable timber which can be found in Cambodia. The geo textile however required a timber falsework which creates tension in the fabric whilst the concrete is being poured, vibrated and cured. Erecting this structure of timber falsework and fabric formwork created a puzzling maze on site which had to be expertly navigated whilst the concrete structure was curing.

When revealing the concrete structure once it had dried we found that it had a few wobbles due to the manual pouring technique and only being able to hand tighten the fabric formwork in it’s falsework clamps. With the concrete still being structurally sound we noticed that when taking a closer look at the detail that the geo textile formwork had left a fascinating gridded texture in the structure.

Finishing the concrete frame sped the build up exponentially. We moved on to the upper steel ring beams and roof trusses which were manually lifted using a pulley system and welded into place. Following this the insulated aluminium roofing panels arrived on site, again being manually lifted onto the roof and secured intoplace. The site started to become busier with the final push getting near. A team of masons arrived on site 

completing the retaining walls which created raised areas within the playground as well as the perforated brick gable walls, these acted as a double skin meaning that there will always be a cooling air flow around the building. Whilst this was happening electricians wired up the lighting, sliding doors were hung and the brick floor was laid. The building started to come together and we gained a glimpse of the community centre which we had designed.

With the finish line close working days got later and we pushed through to make sure that the school would be ready to move into by the time we left. Working up to the very last minute, we tied the last pieces of bamboo to the doors, stopped and enjoyed the celebration with the local community. Most of the team left the following morning so to say goodbye we joined together in the classroom of the centre with some of the Cambodian workers, with whom we had became close friends throughout the project, for a final meal and time to reflect and dream of what would come next in our architectural adventure.

Author: Ryan McGaffney and Jennifer Taggart