Bartlett Environmental Design Prize 2024: 'Engraved Cycles' by Jeff Qu Liu
Bartlett Environmental Design Prize 2020: 'Reimagining The Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park’ by Scott (Siqi) Chen
Members of the Max Fordham team have been tutoring at UCL Bartlett School of Architecture for many years. We’ve established a great relationship with the University over that time and we formally recognised that relationship in 2013 by sponsoring an award at the annual student Summer Show.
The Max Fordham Environmental Design Prize is given to the 5th-year design project that demonstrates the greatest level of ambition, originality, technical innovation and philosophical rigour in the field of environmental design and sustainability.
The prize consists of £1,000 to help the student cover project-related expenses. In addition, they present their project to our whole practice and receive ideas from our engineers and sustainability consultants to help them further develop the environmental premise of their project.
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The winner of Bartlett Environmental Design Prize 2020 is 'Reimagining The Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park’: Scott (Siqi) Chen.
Sicily’s landscape is dotted with incomplete structures from the 20th-century. There are 696 unfinished buildings in Italy that have been identified and documented to date, and around 40% of them are located in Sicily. They are the result of political corruption and planning disasters, while also becoming a cultural symbol for the island.
Inspired by the artist proposal ‘Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park’ by Alterzioni Video in 2008, the 5th year design project by Scott (Siqi) Chen studies nine unfinished structures in Giarre, the town with the greatest concentration of unfinished public buildings in Italy.
The project undertakes a critical review of the chosen incomplete structures, based on their current condition as surveyed, and proposes some potential redevelopment strategies related to building lifecycle considerations. The aim is to use the unfinished buildings as an architectural resource for the benefit of the local community. What is proposed is to complete some buildings or parts of buildings, as some are oversized for current community needs, and to deconstruct or ‘quarry’ (cut into parts) un-needed parts of buildings for use as components and materials for new and remodelled building designs in the town. This will help to deliver much needed community buildings and renewal to the benefit of the local community.
The unfinished buildings are reused to fulfil their original promises of providing community facilities, and their existing unfinished materiality and spatiality are celebrated in the designs to produce some tailored buildings and memorize a unique history of Sicily. The new buildings also have a unique architectural character due to incorporation of reused components and recycled materials from the unfinished buildings. This approach has a broader applicability, whereby buildings to be demolished could instead be deconstructed into components that could be used in local architecture projects with the careful involvement of the design team, with the potential to reduce embodied carbon and generate tailored architecture form and language.
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Reimagining the Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park
©Scott Chen
