AJ Small Projects 2022 winners announced

The London-based practice topped a 20-strong shortlist with its project Drovers’ Bough, while Unknown Works won People’s Choice award for Brightbox and Studio BAD was given the social sustainability award for St Margaret’s Church.

Drovers’ Bough is a 32m² residence which stands 2m above an old drovers track in a woodland in the West of England. The £70,200 building is accessed via an elongated staircase and contains a double-height living room with kitchen, bathroom and mezzanine sleeping area.

The winner was picked by by a judging panel comprised of Eleanor Fawcett, head of design at the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation; Gort Scott director Fiona Scott; Studio Gil director Pedro Gil; and Rashid Ali, director at Rashid Ali Architects, winner of last year’s award.

The panel was chaired by AJ architecture editor Rob Wilson and was joined by AJ sustainability editor Hattie Hartman.

The jury said Akin Studio’s ‘rigorous’ scheme ‘responded to place in a thoughtful, bespoke way’ and deemed it ‘an incredibly original outcome to an efficient decision-making process’.

Brightbox by Unknown Works took the People's Choice award, winning nearly 30 per cent out of the votes received via a readers’ poll run on the AJ's website.

The structure is a prototype for an off-grid interconnected classroom, clinic and hub for communities without infrastructure, and is based in a primary school in the Bidi Bidi refugee settlement of Lori in northern Uganda.

A separate social sustainability prize was awarded to St Margaret's Church by Studio BAD, an incremental redevelopment of a church in Swansea that had previously been condemned as unfit for use.

The judges were impressed by the one major intervention – putting in underfloor heating – which had been made to make the church inhabitable. They were also ‘fascinated by the scalability of the project’ and ‘its application to larger spaces to bring them back into use valuably’.

Whittled down from over 170 entries, this year’s shortlist included a typically wide range of schemes – from pier to pool house to community hub. The mix is less urban than in previous years, reflecting the trend of moving to rural retreats during the pandemic.

On Wednesday (6 April) the 20 shortlisted designers presented their projects to the panel of judges in a crit-style format. The awards were announced later in the day at a free-to-attend event held at the London offices of Apt – the first in-real-life event for AJ Small Projects since 2019.

All entries to this year’s awards are free to view in the AJ Buildings Library with the full shortlist available here. Copies of the AJ Small Projects special issue are available to buy from the AJ shop.

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