Bartlett Environmental Design Prize 2024: 'Engraved Cycles' by Jeff Qu Liu
Bartlett Environmental Design Prize 2022: ‘Post-Industrial Ephemera’ by Paul Brooke
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 2022 is ‘Post-Industrial Ephemera’: Paul Brooke.
Titled ‘Post-Industrial Ephemera’, this project identifies and responds to the resultant material, infrastructural, social, and ecological condition of the UK’s post-industrial wastelands – a result of mass industrial decentralisation and offshoring. Developed in parallel with laboratory-based novel biomaterial innovation, the project employs data-driven design processes to propose a symbiotic post-waste architecture which offers a reinterpretation of highly toxic sprawling infrastructural wastelands as sites of rich material opportunity.
Woven into the abandoned Redcar Steelworks brownfield site within the UK’s Industrial North, and responding to a site which, at the hands of industrially driven sea level rise, is continually contested between toxic land and polluted water, Post-Industrial Ephemera utilises live environmental data-streams alongside digital studies into reparative bacterial growth and spread, to create an architecture which algorithmically swarms the vast material wasteland, searching for useful waste materials from which to generate itself through new post-waste biomaterials, allowing the network to continue to feed its growth whilst healing the polluted landscape.
A novel biomaterial production hub and centre of local industrial heritage, the masterplan offers a cyclical approach to post-industrial architectural carbon negativity through the development and deployment of bacterial post-waste composite biomaterials, which are directly born from the site. These materials, a symbiosis between site-specific material aggregate waste from the demolition and decay of the once iconic infrastructural landscape, and the eutrophic algae-rich waters which are the product of the toxic industrial output and metallic disintegration on the site, aim to bioremediate the post-industrial biome by locking vast amounts of carbon and toxic pollutants within the 3D printed building skin.
Through orchestrated decay and regeneration, the biomass waste product from this material process enters a cyclical ecology, contributing to the further growth of the network, allowing the architecture to be constantly growing, breathing and evolving, continually responding to the site’s environmental toxicity.
The full video portfolio can be viewed here.
The final thesis document can be viewed here.
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Post-Industrial Ephemera: An extension of the landscape and its material condition, the network is constantly growing and decaying through data-responsive 3D printing.
©Paul Brooke
Data-Driven Architectural Generation: Given the requirement for post-industrial aggregate and cyanobacteria to sustain the networks materiality, the architectural layout logic is defined by algorithmic searching and swarming on the site, as the network searches for these post-waste material inputs within the wasteland landscape.
©Paul Brooke
Post-Industrial Ephemera: The network navigates throughout the industrial relics on the site, respecting their iconography and preserving their materiality.
©Paul Brooke
Biomaterial Development and Deployment: In varying the input ratio of post-industrial aggregate waste to cyanobacterial biopolymer, a library of carbon-negative post-waste biomaterials with varying properties of translucency, rigidity, opacity and flexibility can be generated. These materials can be deployed through voxelisation and 3D printing on a continual gradient to achieve heterogenous façade properties within a homogenous material matrix.
©Paul Brooke
Printing Functionally Graded Biomaterial Architectures: The deployment of the various biomaterials along a continuous material gradient is defined by the functional capabilities of the biopolymer in relation to the architectural and environmental requirements of the building. As such, solar analysis, structural topological optimisation and programmatic analysis are unified to inform a continuous functionally graded 3D-printed material system.
©Paul Brooke
Architectural Symbiosis: Various structural, environmental, material and biological systems are deployed throughout the network. These systems are mutually beneficial and as such, can be defined as architecturally symbiotic. For example, the biopolymer facade and primary truss systems augment each other’s structural capability, whilst the bio-reactive algal louvers control internal light and thermal conditions.
©Paul Brooke
