Bartlett Environmental Design Prize 2025: 'License for a (likely) lithopolis', by William Hodges
Max Fordham engineers have been tutoring at UCL Bartlett School of Architecture for many years, and we’ve established a great relationship with the university over that time. In 2013 we formally recognised the relationship by establishing an annual sponsored award at the student Summer Show.
The Max Fordham Environmental Design Prize is awarded to a 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 of £1,000 helps the winner cover project-related expenses, and in addition, they present their project to our practice, receiving feedback and ideas from our engineers and sustainability consultants, to help further develop the environmental premise of their project.
The winning project
This year's winning design, 'License for a (likely) lithopolis' reimagines abandoned quarries transformed into towns of stone, where material and settlement merge.
William Hodges, designer of the winning project, based his ideas on the ancient Italian city of Cavo del Barco, that grew from the region's historic travertine quarries. Stone waste forms the foundations of a new urban environment, breathing life into a landscape scarred by industry.
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The output of the project’s realisation sought to mimic the topographical terrain of the quarry site — in layers and levels — depicting the artificial benching of stone basins. The result is not merely a city built from stone, but a city of stone.
William David Jack Hodges
Explored through a material methodology of re-appropriated waste, a low carbon architecture emerged where site, skin and structure are one of the same — not different — where buildings are built of and within the material ground itself.
William David Jack Hodges
In a continual state of topographical transformation, glimpses of the future Lithopolis become visible through gaps in the trees. Perched on the edge of an artificial cliff, a new typology for urban living can be observed from above.
William David Jack Hodges
Through a rigorous analysis of existing socio-environmental conditions, the project seeks to improve and diversify the provision of social services, transforming the existing polis into a place to live, not just reside.
William David Jack Hodges
Organised around artificial lakes within quarried sites of abandonment, the new-found urban archipelago integrates industrial and social systems into new symbiotic relationships.
William David Jack Hodges
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2025 winner William Hodges (left) meets Simon Lovell (right), Director of Communications at Max Fordham
stonehousephotographic.com