The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the 49 winners of the 2018 RIBA National Awards. From skyline-altering buildings to sensitive small-scale sculptures, this year’s top projects showcase a wide-ranging selection of scales, featuring designs from Foster + Partners, Hawkins\Brown, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, and Niall McLaughlin Architects.
For the past century or so, the key to turning around the fortunes of a community was thought to be simple: large scale, infrastructural overhaul was capable of rethinking a place from the ground up, fixing any problems. The deficiencies with this sort of thinking are now well known, and in recent years small, surgical interventions which preserve the existing qualities of a town have gained traction. But how do you create large-scale change with such small-scale proposals?
The town of Rainham, at the far Eastern reaches of London, might hold an answer. Having preserved its village-like atmosphere despite being part of London's industrial hinterlands, since the turn of the millennium Rainham has been the subject of a series of small developments that have made a big overall change. Projects by Alison Brooks Architects, Maccreanor Lavington, Peter Beard LANDROOM, Studio Weave, Civic, and East have improved key spaces within Rainham while connecting it to the Thames and the nearby marshes - all by being respectful of the town's existing qualities and responsive to each others' interventions.
The Mayor of London Boris Johnson has unveiled three proposals to redevelop Heathrow Airport into 'Heathrow City,' a new town occupying the site that according to one study "could provide 90,000 jobs and 80,000 homes" in West London. Developed in parallel with Foster + Partners' proposal to create a new airport in the Thames Estuary, the three possible designs are part of a plan that Johnson believes will not only improve the capital's aviation capacity, but also the quality of living in the area around the existing Heathrow Airport.
The three proposals, by Rick Mather Architects, Hawkins\Brown and Maccreanor Lavington, all take very different approaches to the brief, which was to create a mixed use residential and commuter town, with a focus on education and technology industries. Find out more about the three different proposals after the break.
London Mayor Boris Johnson has enlisted the help of three architects, Hawkins\Brown, Rick Mather Architects and Maccreanor Lavington Architects to design a new town on the site of Heathrow Airport. The move is designed to encourage support for Johnson's plan to build a new airport in the Thames Estuary, jokingly dubbed 'Boris Island' by some. If the Estuary Airport were to go ahead it could mean closing Heathrow, currently one of the world's busiest airports, freeing the land up for the new development. You can read more on the story at the Architects' Journal.
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_Peter_Landers.jpg?1530722948 "© Peter Landers")
_Jack_Hobhouse.jpg?1530722837 "© Jack Hobhouse")
_Keith_Barnes.jpg?1530723141 "© Keith Barnes")
