Silver Medal 2010 Winner – Jonathan Schofield
The Silver Medal which is given to the best Part 2 design project has been won this year by University of Westminster student Jonathan Schofield for his project entitled ‘Creative Evolution – Silvertown Ship Breaking Yard’. The awards in their current format have been running since 1984, but a ‘Presidential Award’ has been awarded since the 1850′s, with the award now seen as the most prestigious award in architecture for student excellence.
Jonathan Schofield
This years winner was recognised for his project of regeneration through an interactive process between the occupants and the abandoned ship parts within the dock. Making the most of the site itself and goods left over from its heyday as part of the world’s largest dock, the lofty goal for the community that would grow up and develop on the site was for them to improve their architectural expression through experimentation and experience.
From Jonathan’s personal statement submission:
“Since the closure of the Royal Docks, Silvertown in East London went from being part of the largest dock in the world to a ghost town, a place of memory. Silvertown ship breaking yard will not only provide the local community with highly skilled jobs but through the creative process of playing, testing, experimenting and reconstructing ship elements, new individual and communal identities for Silvertown’s inhabitants will be created. The project can be categorised into three stages.
Ships are broken up through a complex process which takes place inside the breaking chamber, a specially designed channel for the extraction of elements where the lighter parts are removed first and the heavier structural parts last — the reverse of traditional construction. Throughout this deconstruction process, elements are extracted either to be recycled through sale at a scrap yard and flea market or to be used for experimental reconstruction.
Jonathans tutors described his representation skills as “remarkable” and likening his style of work for the project as “clearly a form of engineering architecture”. From their tutor statement:
The drawings are obsessively worked, showing in plan section and perspectives every detail of the architecture. In contrast the models, conceived in part as filmic scenarios, are made of perspex, reduced down to the simplicity of forms and achieving a minimalist elegance.
A public exhibition of the winners work will go on display at the RIBA from 1 December 2010 to the end of January 2011, at which point it will move to the Milkandsugar Gallery in Liverpool for exhibition between 16 February and 8 April 2011.
