ARCHITECTS FOR HEALTH (AfH) STUDENT DESIGN AWARDS 2024

Malcolm Ebose - With Permanence in mind: Thoughts on a Holistic Health Typology - London School of Architecture - Masters in Architecture
Student Design Awards

STUDENT DESIGN AWARDS 2024

We are delighted to announce the launch of the AfH Student Design Awards 2024!

The AfH Student Design Awards is an annual design competition for students and 2024 marks our 16th year.  As well as promoting good design, AfH is committed to encouraging the next generation to become passionate about the quality of design for health and social care settings. Our goal is to celebrate the opportunities for innovation and experimentation and to bring together students from different disciplines to share their creative ideas. We are keen to engage students within all design disciplines, including landscape, public art, interior design and architecture.

KINDLY SPONSORED BY 

AWARDS STREAMS

We offer flexible awards streams which are dependent on the type of entries we receive each year and we accept mostly BA and MA level submissions. AfH are also pleased to accept independent students who have a passion for designing healthcare environments.

AfH members support colleges and universities where healthcare already forms part of the curriculum, encouraging those undertaking healthcare design projects to extend and embed their learning, through reviews (crits) and seminars on request

If your students are interested in designing for healthcare but this is not part of the curriculum AfH members can support them too by offering a proxy client and/or a link to a local practice available on request – if we have a connection in your area. We work closely with NHS Trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups, who can act as proxy clients to support the project through their hospital and community sites. A suitable proxy client can be arranged on request but is not essential.

The brief below can be used at the tutors’ discretion.

THE BRIEF

The Form of Wellbeing – a Sum of Parts
We are becoming increasingly aware of the need for a healthy environment, of the problems of pollution, obesity, global warming, loneliness; the destruction of species and the emergence of super bugs that have touched and impacted on all of us in recent times. We are now very much aware of the need for exercise, sunlight, vitamins, contact with nature and social bonds. Even governments are shifting from their two-dimensional metric measuring national life from GDP to a wellbeing economy, putting the wellbeing of people and the planet first. It’s about a holistic prosperity for humanity not only around our economy, our society, our environment and habitats but also our physical and mental health.

So how can our architecture and the spaces and landscape we inhabit, respond to this new consciousness?
Ancient cultures have already explored this. The Asclepieon, situated outside Epidaurus, was the most celebrated healing centre dating from the third or fourth century BC. It was a place where one went to be cured: a total landscape of wellbeing, built around a health centre. Embracing temples, clinics, landscape, houses for sleeping and dream cures as well as an athletics stadium, it was of course, also a theatre for cultural, spiritual, and physical catharsis. The views out to sea and the captivating landscape were as much a part of the healing process as were the health treatments. Over the years a revival of these ideals of a healthy city have emerged in response to poverty, plague, over development and war. The early modernists created an architecture of clinical precision, light and air, in which the interior merged into an exterior framed by trees and greenery. The anthroposophists created an architecture based on observation of the essential, living world and in the strengthening of the mental-spiritual qualities of man; in the observation of the mineral, plant, animal and human world and in the observation, and above all strengthening, of one’s own thinking, feeling and will. Health was always at the heart of the project but was very much part of wider milieu. More recently, with the medicalisation of pivotal moments: life, birth, old age and death, the idea of an architecture for health was extracted from the mainstream of construction and ghettoised into the modern hospital and clinic, a sterile environment with its focus on healing, shifting towards an institution.

Has this “ghettoisation” of the architecture of health led to a wholesale forgetting of the importance of wellbeing in the architecture of the everyday?
In recent years, our understanding of health has progressed into an appreciation of “wellbeing”. In architecture, this transition could not be more pronounced: it is the move away from the functionalist constraints of an aesthetic of hygiene, to a contemporary situation in which architecture, technology, interiors and the environment are entwined in a symbiotic relationship with occupants which will evolve, envisaging a future too different from our present.

So how will how “wellbeing” manifest and evolve in the things we touch, the places we live, the places we heal and the towns and cities we live in?
In responding to this brief, students are also invited to consider Architects for Health’s three content streams for 2022: ‘Dream’, ‘Build’ and ‘Heal’. These streams explore the evolutionary, revolutionary and the practical, creating scope for students from a wide range of disciplines to submit responses – either individually or collectively. Collaboration with other design disciplines is also welcome.
More details on each stream are available here: – https://www.architectsforhealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2022_LeadershipStreams_INTRO_RevB.pdf

awards

Entries are judged by a panel of leading practitioners and clinicians.

Winners will be announced during, an in-person/hybrid event in London in early July and rewarded with prizes, certificates and the opportunity to discuss their work with others including architectural and design leaders in healthcare.

Students who submit work will receive a complementary AfH membership for one year as part of their registration. And all submissions are captured in a beautifully designed and produced A4 bound booklet celebrating the students work and each participant will receive a copy.

practice sponsors

Sponsorship of the AfH Student Design Awards is invited from Architects practices only at £500 per practice. This benefits of this are…

    • Practice logo and hyperlink included on:
      • AfH Sponsors page for one year
      • AfH 2024 Student Design Awards Event page and Events page
      • All email notices to AfH members
      • All advertising of the event (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn)
    • Inclusion of Practice logo on sponsors banner (virtual)
    • Inclusion of Practice logo in SDA booklet
    • Plus an invitation to join us for the Awards ceremony
    • If you would like to sponsor the AfH Student Design Awards 2024 please get in touch with our Programme Director.

TIMELINE + ACTIONS 2024

Jan - Mar

AfH reconnect and invite schools and universities to take part in the AfH Student Design Awards 2024

Jan - May

AfH members offer reviews/crits/proxy-clients for local universities – available on request at a mutually acceptable time

march

Tutors by the end of March:

  • Please confirm via email that your student/s would like to take part in the Student Design Awards 2024 and
  • Nominate student/s using Google Sheets (the link to this will be sent to you individually after you have confirmed participation)

march - may

Nominated students – register to the AfH Student Design Awards 2024

  • Register through the website by becoming an AfH member, using a discount code – which will be provided by your tutor
  • You will receive a free AfH membership for 1 year, giving you access to our annual events and webinars
  • Once you have registered, you will receive information on how to submit your work
  • Submission deadline Monday 27 May 2024

june

AfH

  • 28 – 31 May | Collate submissions into categories
  • 3 – 17 June | Judges review submissions and score them according to a set criteria
  • 17 June – 1 July | Scores are moderated, winners selected, prizes prepared and certificates printed! | AfH team compile digital loop and printed booklet
  • 4 July | Award ceremony + Student presentations | venue – (Edwards Room, The Kings Fund, 11 Cavendish Square, London W1G 0A – to be confirmed)

CONTACT

For further details of the programme and to register please contact the Student Design Awards team here

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