Winners of the 2014 RIBA President's Medals Student Awards

RIBA announced the 2014 winners of the prestigious President's Medals Student Architecture Awards last night in a ceremony in London. Established in 1836, the RIBA President's Medals are regarded as the world's highest awards in architectural education. The awards program honors the crème de la crème of architecture students for their talent and excellence, and aims to incite global architectural debate.

This year's awards received nominations for student design projects and dissertations from 317 architecture schools in 61 countries -- the highest number on record.

Awards include The RIBA Silver Medal (the highest design prize), the RIBA Bronze Medal, and the Dissertation Medal. Additional awards this year included the Serjeant Awards for Excellence in Drawing; the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Foundation UK Fellowship; and High Commendations and Commendations.

Scroll down further to see some of the winning projects.

RIBA SILVER MEDAL WINNER (best design project at Part 2 – Diploma/Masters level): Nick Elias at Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
Project: ‘PoohTown’

Project summary - "While revisiting Slough and the industrial growth and social inequality the town experienced during the 1920s - the decade when A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories were first published and became popular for their accounts of a fictitious happy world - the project re-evaluates covert responses to socio-political exclusion. This is achieved by reinterpreting the underpinning state of contentment that typifies Milne’s protagonist in order to propose ‘happy’ architectures where residents can live, work and play together in a sustainable economic network.

By doing so, ‘PoohTown’ establishes the grounds for a subtle critique of today’s cities potential to prescribe policies of happiness alongside familiar amenities (a concept, in the author’s opinion, worryingly absent in current city planning) and alerts for the need to design for emotions as a way to find architecture’s purpose in a changing world. Nick was tutored by CJ Lim and Bernd Felsinger."

RIBA BRONZE MEDAL WINNER (best design project at Part 1 – degree level): Simon Dean at Kingston University (tutors: Jane Houghton and Stephen Baty)
Project: ‘Flow, 1944’

Project summary - "On the surface, the project proposes a design for a bathhouse located on a quarry carved into the rock created by solidified lava that erupted from Mount Vesuvius in 1944. As it develops this idiosyncratic space of transience on a shunned landscape, ‘Flow, 1944’ highlights the importance of the notions of ephemerality and the passing of time in the formation of built environments as they are conceived by architects and inhabited by users, thus alerting for the role played by architecture in constructing historical layers of physical strata and collective meaning."

DISSERTATION MEDAL WINNER: Jasper Ludewig at University of Sydney for ‘Made Ground: A spatial history of Sydney Park’

Project summary - "Produced under the supervision of Ross Anderson and submitted by the University of Sydney, the dissertation focusses on Sydney Park as a case study of ‘Spatial History’, a method of historical inquiry developed by Australian geographer, historian and architectural theorist, Paul Carter. Each of Made Ground’s six essays discusses a series of practices, beliefs and tools in the historical production of Australia’s physical and social space to, ultimately, illustrate the postcolonial capacity of interpreting the texts and records of the past as a way of destabilising assumptions about Australia’s places of the present in which architects, planners, urban designers and artists intervene."

SERJEANT AWARDS FOR EXCELLENCE IN DRAWING

SOM FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP

COMMENDATIONS

Silver Medal High Commendation:

• Justin Cawley from the University of Sydney for ‘An Ark for Endangered Atmospheres’

Silver Medal Commendations:

• Yannis Halkiopoulos from the University of Westminster for ‘Brooklyn Co-operative’
• Louis Sullivan from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, for ‘The Living Dam’

Bronze Medal Commendations:

• Samuel Little from London Metropolitan University for ‘City Frame: The reappropriation of Maple House’
• Emily Priest from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, for ‘Rong Xhan Safehouse’
• Ho Yeung (Howell) Tsang from the University of Hong Kong for ‘Urban Living Transition: Vanishing heritage of Hong Kong residence’

Dissertation Medal High Commendation: Ekaterina Tikhoniouk from University College Dublin for ‘Towards a Common Ground for Play: Examining the history of play and playgrounds in Dublin’s Liberties’

Dissertation Medal Commendation: Leon Fenster from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, for ‘Exilic Landscapes: Synagogues and Jewish architectural identity in 1870s Britain’

The 2014 President's Medals Student Architecture Awards Show public exhibition, which showcases the year's student architecture works around the globe, opens at the RIBA Practice Space on December 4 through January 31, 2015.