RIBA Announces Winners of the President's Medals Student Awards 2009

1. The principle role of the towers is to act as an environmental warning device. The architecture is alive, dramatizing shifts in environmental conditions; breathing, creaking, groaning, sweating and crying when stressed. Air-bags on the face of the towers expand and contract, while hundreds of tensile trunks are sporadically activated, casting water on to the heated facades to produce steam. An empty watchtower at the top of each tower gives them the impression that the fragile landscape below is constantly being surveyed.

2. Across the estuary, a bed of salt marshes provides a natural form of flood defence and habitats for wildlife. Due to rising water levels and adverse weather conditions, the salt marshes are quickly deteriorating. The proposal suggests how megastructures can be integrated and used to encourage the growth of natural defence mechanisms against flooding in order to protect the erosion of fragile coastline areas and our most important cities. Over time, sand is collected at the base of each tower to form a spit across the mouth of the estuary, absorbing energy from the waves.

This project is conceived of as a provocation and speculation on how these two demands may be hybridized as an alternative to the typical conservationist practices applied across the islands. The two traditionally mutually exclusive programs of salt farming and Flamingo habitat are re imagined as a new form of symbiotic designed ecology; a pink wonderland, built from colored bacteria and salt crystallization, dissolving and reshaping itself with seasonal and evaporative cycles. The building becomes an ecosystem in itself, completely embedded in the context that surrounds it.

Formed from fine webs of nylon fibers held in an aluminum frame, this strange string instrument allows the salt farming process to be drawn up out of the lake, returning it to the endemic flamingos whilst at the same time ensuring the continuation of a vital local industry. Using just capillary action, salt water from the lake crystallizes on the tension strings forming glistening, translucent enclosures. It encrusts the infrastructure of a flamingo observation hide and solidifies into a harvestable field ready to be scraped clean by miners.

The project has been developed through scale models that were used as host structures for an in depth series of crystallization experiments. Material erosion, spatial qualities, structurally capacity and evaporative cycles were all determined through physical testing. The architecture and its physical models grew slowly across time, emerging from the salt waters they were immersed in, to become fully developed crystalline structures.

The masonry arch bridge can be regarded as a relatively simple structure when two systems cross at ninety degrees to each other; however a question arises when the systems cross at an oblique angle. This problem was raised previously in the design of canals, but became more widespread with the railway system due to the increased regularity of its occurrence. The long sweeping curves of the railway line also add additional complexity in contrast to the predominantly straight road and canal layouts: The solution to this problem was the skew or the oblique bridge.

This may sound like a reasonably simple solution and a relatively insignificant piece of civil engineering, but when one attempts to visualise a masonry arch bridge and to consider how the stonework may be skewed to allow for the oblique angle, the complexity quickly becomes apparent. This study looks in detail at one particular solution to the nineteenth century problem of the skew bridge. It is based on a drawing, published in The Builder in 1845, to accompany an article on the construction of skew bridges. An attempt is made here to fully explain this drawing and to investigate the circumstances surrounding its publication.