Bartlett Environmental Design Prize 2026: 'The Danube and the Hydro State: Emerging 'Extra-Active' Landscapes', by Oliver Penny

7 Jul 2026

Aerial rendering of a large waterfront development integrated into a dam-like structure, featuring cascading terraces planted with trees and gardens, a rooftop park, and a waterfall flowing through the centre. Boats travel across the water beside the complex.

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.

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Concept rendering of a curved, vegetation-covered megastructure dam spanning a river valley, set within a dramatic mountain and reservoir landscape. — © Oliver Penny

The 2026 winning project

'Oliver Penny's winning design creates a 'Hydro-State' on the River Danube, echoing the monumental dams of old Yugoslavia. It imagines a new form of energy-based sovereignty emerging between Romania and Serbia, where ecological systems, rather than formalised political borders, shape territory and identity.

Reconfiguring the river as a shared political, ecological and energy system, the project metabolises Yugoslav-era concrete to construct the project and new material networks. Oliver speculates how centring emerging renewable energy resources could offer points of unification rather than division. He ultimately provokes us to consider how far we are willing to go in pursuit of sustainability, and where our own 'sustainable contradictions' lie.

Read more about Oliver Penny's award-winning project

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Three architectural elevation views of a large multifunctional dam structure. The left elevation features a prominent cylindrical tower and a series of water outlets. The central elevation highlights a monumental waterfall cascading through terraced, vegetation-covered façades. The right elevation shows a lock or lift structure extending vertically from the water's edge, framed by two tall concrete towers. — Different typologies and climates vary across the length of the dam. Energy abundance reorganises the river into a material network, where post-socialist concrete is metabolised under a new ideology. As the dam grows, the post-socialist vacuum is filled by new, energy-intensive industries powered by the dam.

© Oliver Penny

Triptych of atmospheric architectural renderings showing vast interior spaces within a monumental dam-like structure. The first view depicts a cavernous concrete chamber with water on the floor and a lone figure standing beneath a beam of light. The second shows a stepped central staircase rising through a circular waterfall inside a dramatic hall. The third presents an industrial-scale machine room with towering turbines and structural elements illuminated by shafts of warm light. — Rarely do we see the infrastructures and industries that support our contemporary society. Only once or twice in their life do people venture down into the depths of the dam to see the magnitude and scale of man’s conquering of nature. As sustainability becomes ideological, these spaces become almost a pilgrimage.

© Oliver Penny

Video: A journey across the dam

The first child of the Dam reminisces about the journeys she used to take across ‘her mountain’ to visit her grandmother. She used to tell stories about the dam - what it was, is and will be - as she reflects on her embodiment of a new Hydro culture.