People + Planet Student Award 2021

We are delighted to have continued recognising the exceptional Environmental design approaches created by the students at Loughborough University School of Architecture through our ‘People + Planet Award’.  Started last year, we have been working with the school’s leadership to identify and select a winner each year based on their final 3^rd year projects.

This year we were hugely impressed by the student’s range of projects, all of which were illustrating high levels of environmental innovation and essential applications for the planet’s need to address its critical position in history, as well as supporting a healthy and carefully considered approach to the world’s people and their wellbeing.

Eventually we decided there should be two winners, and are delighted to introduce Katey Oven and Daniel Jordan. A few key images of their projects are illustrated below along with short summaries.

We have seen both students grow over the last three years through our invitations to review their progress at design juries, and in fact Daniel spent a year working with us, and wish them both well in their future design journeys and look forward to seeing their approach filter into the environment.

The architecture school has really excelled from a start up a few years ago into the UK’s top ten, and wish Robert Schmidt 111 and his team all the best for 2021/22.

Daniel Jordan: Return to the Carioca Backlands

‘Return to the Carioca Backlands’ is a project which explores horticultural futures and a conceptual mosaic to imagine future domesticities for a people now removed from the rurality of Rio’s once forested wetlands.

The chosen site is on the brink of urbanisation, still building to this day on its modernist foundations.

Through the design of a housing scheme, which incorporates technologies both old and new, the people of the carioca are given a place to practice and preserve.

Largely inspired by the 1936 book ‘O Sertao Carioca’, this project recalls the bucolic studies of its author Magalhaes Correa, creating a space for flora and fauna embedded in the metropolitan; an urban backland.

Katey Oven: Project Drawdown, Kigali

This decided the program of Project Drawdown, Kigali, to be sectioned into the seven main categories of Drawdown, to serve as multidisciplinary hub for regenerative practices.

Functioning as an education, advisory and demonstrative centre, it is a place for people to go with a dilemma and be provided with personalised, system-based and regenerative solutions. The program ambition will be achieved by providing people with the skills, resources and knowledge with one on one consultations and group lectures being crucial to make everyday people capable of thriving at their ambitions.

Instead of being presented with a sustainable or medical ‘one fixes all’ solution, people will be provided with a system-based way of going about a problem which gets to the root. Therefore, it provides a holistic range of services which provide holistic based answers and help with a strategy on how to solve it.