Student awards and prizes

Part 2 Dissertation Commendation
Mourning the People's Princess: Public Grief and the Consecration of Space
George Wilson

A probing study of the way in which the British public mourned the death of Diana, The Princess of Wales. By focusing in a non-judgemental way on this iconic public figure, the study reveals how groups, which are not architect led, collaborate to overcome their sadness of loss.

Mixing personal accounts, testimonials and scholarly scrutiny of research in the field, the study plots and critically analyses a range of spontaneous memorials created to pay tribute to Diana. It argues that these memorials are a crucial way in which people grieve and that their value is important for architects to understand.

George's thesis was fashioned for the Major Study Module, an independent research dissertation or design project, where students have the opportunity to explore in detail a topic of their choice as part of the Diploma in Architecture. The thesis was supervised by Dr Igea Troiani.

Read more about this award in the School press release.

Part 2 Dissertation Commendation
[Here be monsters]
Jamie Williamson

"The study delves into the ethical and moral obligations of boundaries, ponders our desire to trespass beyond the psychological fence of set parameters, addresses humanity's fear and curiosity of the unknown and culminates with the everyday, yet devalued ritual of moving through a door..." Jamie Williamson

"Through this study, the author challenges conventional means of representation, and questions how the borderlines on maps and the section lines on architectural drawings can anticipate and accommodate the complexities of inhabitation. Ultimately the dissertation invites us to consider architecture as a process of rites, in which the 'line' takes on multi-dimensional meanings transforming the way we comprehend architectural space..." John Stevenson & Helena Webster

Part 1 Project SOM Winner
Transology: A Vehicle Manufacturing Plant for Southwark, London
Claudia White

Three students from Oxford Brookes University featured in the RIBA President’s Medals 2007 ceremony held at the RIBA on 28 November 2007. Claudia White was the winner of the SOM Prize for her 3rd year undergraduate project, tutored by Matt Gaskin and Toby Shew (Unit G). The project was judged by a panel that included Nigel Coates and Martha Schwartz, and was described as ‘memorable and compelling’.

Another Oxford Brookes undergraduate, Paul Nicholls, was shortlisted for the Bronze Medal. His project for a natural history museum in Hyde Park, tutored by Amanda Marshall and Andrew Holmes (Unit F), was one of the six shortlisted schemes at Part 1.

Finally Julia Bouvy, a postgraduate student at Oxford Brookes, was one of two students to win a RIBA/ICE McAslan Bursary. Julia, currently taking the Development and Emergency Practice special route in the Diploma in Architecture, was awarded £1000 for her project to regenerate embankment life on the Senegal river in West Africa.

President's Research Award
Carbon Reduction Model for UK dwellings
Rajat Gupta PhD of the Year

DECoRuM® is a next generation GIS-based bottom-up model for counting, costing and reducing energy-related CO2 emissions from existing UK dwellings.

The DECoRuM® model is able to clearly point out and identify sources of domestic emissions, so that pollution hotspots can be targeted. It performs calculations of carbon emissions based on more readily available secondary data such as SAP ratings analyses of domestic properties.

Part 2 Dissertation
Who Do They Think We Are? Perceptions of Architects in twenty first century Britain
Angela Hatherell

"Architects? Aloof and elitist? Well superficially their (our) professional body shows clear signs of being just this, so what about the members? And what does everyone else think about architects? Do non-architects care about architects? Do they know about architects? And what is this knowledge based on and informed by? Personal experience? The media? Fiction?" Angela Hatherell

Architects rarely recognise the picture others paint of them. Why is this? Angela's dissertation set out to describe and understand the 'image of the architect'. The research was underpinned by theories of identity, self-image and image-perception (Goffman, Giddens, etc). The methodology consisted of a number of discrete investigations into scenarios where the public experience architects including film, television, novels, inherited memory and personal encounter...

Part 1 Project
Subterranean Specimen Rig
Daniel Rowland

"'Subterranean Specimen Rig' is a mechanism that reads it's surrounding environment. Facilities assume their position on site subject to tidal fluctuations, delivering a sequence of speculative conditions. The section is not an idealised moment in time, rather a generator of potential configurations. Patination and water are encouraged to invade the laboratories. Nighttime illumination under ground level evokes the architectures of a living organism..." Daniel Rowland

The year was structured as a continuous programme of research, sub divided into series of interconnecting episodes. As architect explorers, students were asked to consider drawings as sites of speculative construction, objects of manufacture, test sites, filters, employing facts and half-truths. Individual architectural positions developed, relationships and scenarios seen as structuring devices for new programmes, were sited in the Lea Valley.

Part 1 Project Commendation
Digital Farm
Guy Scott

"The digital farm mediates between two ideal landscapes: a tactile one in the physical realm and an abstract one in the digital realm. But there are problems...

How does the farm respond to changes in demand? What effects might this have on the spaces we occupy? How can I conceive of infinite space? My project uses the analogy of physical growth to conceive of problems posed by digital space. Architectural issues of scale and site need to be reconsidered as they are no longer fixed, but endlessly malleable..." Guy Scott

This unit focused on researching the future of workspace in both the digital and physical environments. Guy's response was to position architecture between these two environments investigating dynamics of scale, growth, artifice, and permanence in the form of digital farm - a new typology of workspace.

Part 1 Project Medal Winner - Serjeant Award
Vehicular Access
Andrew Yek

"This project accellerates in line with the current explosion of information to the speed of a drive-in institution. The library is seen as both vehicle and road. Illuminated billboards delineate moments of intimate space along the darkening road. There is a vague sense of doom in the animations, as if architecture were to disappear in the vast expanse of information along which it glides, a mechanical Icarus illuminating the path to information meltdown." Andrew Yek

The student develops Victor Hugo's prediction that books would destroy architecture, and that architecture's powerful symbolic content would disappear to be replaced by the narrative and more easily accessible content of a collection of books...

Part 1 Dissertation Medal Winner
Twelve part narrative
Gwyn Lloyd Jones

"Whether travelling to the ultimate destination of California, or to some intermediate point, the direction of migration in the USA is always west. I undertook a personal odyssey across America to investigate the themes of migration, place, identity and architecture..." Gwyn Lloyd Jones

Not only is the resulting essay superbly written, combining biography and literature with historical and political analysis, but many of Gwyn's specific insights are quite startling. The one-block-deep Gay/Artists Quarter in Columbus, Ohio, is revealed as a 'Potemkin Village' of political correctness. The egocentric, unsettled delusions of Frank Lloyd Wright are traced forwards to other Mid-Western cultural fantasists like Bob Dylan and Eminem...

Part 1 Dissertation Commendation
The Fall and Rise of the British Mall
Nick Jewel

"Implicit within the current manifestation of the shopping mall is the potential to realise a more complex social organism. Sadly, this potential is suppressed at the moment by a bludgeoning regime of programmatic violence that seeks to maintain the controlled values seen as key to the success of the mall. This study, by recourse to an analysis of British precedents such as the Trafford Centre and Bluewater, questions the validity of these values and the mechanisms of consumption which underlie them." Nick Jewel

Nick Jewell's substantial essay is the most rounded piece that I have yet read about shopping malls. It is not a subject that is usually handled well by architectural writers...

Part 2 Project Commendation
Billboard Apartments, Paddington
Mimis Koumantanos

Creating an urban horizontal advertising unit with the aim of developing a global product; Capitalising on the profitability of the unit's double-function as pavement slab and billboard; Stating that architectural design is increasingly becoming linked with cash-flow figures and feasibility charts; Declaring that buildings can be designed to meet the financial needs of the city without being forced to do so..." Mimis Koumantanos

The scheme devised by Mimis Koumantanos offers a realistic but visionary response to the notion of high-density urban life. He began with a fascination for images of Japanese cities, especially the way in which every available surface seems to be used for advertising or signage. As Mimis studied the photographs of Tokyo, he came to the conclusion that the only surface which was left to claim was the horizontal: the pavement...

Part 1 Project Commendation
Immigration Terminal, Dover
Peter Williams

"The design of the building is intentionally monumental and brutal in its honesty, as well as providing a clear-cut threshold between country, zones of time, and states of mind. From the sea, the tectonics of the building appear to take on the qualities of an open door. What exactly lies through that brightly-lit opening ? Does it mark a process of tough offical interrogation, or the gateway to a new life ? As the building proceeds to call into question its own context and purpose, so too the viewer is encouraged to examine their own sense of boundaries, whether these be physical or mental..." Peter Williams

Peter Williams' multi-layered work is built on the foundations of an unusually broad understanding of architecture and its cultural context. More importantly, it is driven by a finely-tuned social conscience.

Part 1 Dissertation Medal Winner
An Essay in Unsymbolisation
Huw Williams

"This study aims to look beyond the material objects of architecture and built form to seek out an alternative model of housing design. Derived from a wide range of cultural, sociological and psychological phenomena, the discourse proposes a house type which investigates the power of the image in both real and virtual realms to present what can be termed as 'existentialist architecture' - that is, an architecture that realises the ephemeral and isolated nature of human inhabitation..." Huw Williams

Huw argues convincingly for higher density urban living with a clearer division between public and private space, and for a more complex integration of modern media into the domestic environment. It is altogether a highly original achievement, and could easily be published to much acclaim...

Part 1 DissertationProject Commendation
The museum of the museum
Paul Gardner

"This study hopes to construct a tale to better identify and illustrate the contemporary condition of the museum. It exists in two parallel texts: one describing an imaginary museum and its collection, and the second (which is rather more didactic) appending and annotating parts of the former. The Museum of the Museum is principally a collection of observations regarding architecture and the contemporary museum, related in the various parts of this paper, its contents and organisation..." Paul Gardner

...in its design, structure and content [this study] is a complex and original piece of work. The author muses on a range of problematic issues related to the nature and function of museums, including topics such as the process of collecting, systems of classification, and the uneasy relationship between configured space and categories of intellectual thought...