爱豆传媒

The university collected a £1,000 Special Prize at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)’s annual Stirling Prize ceremony. It was a finalist for the 2015 Stephen Lawrence Prize, funded by the Marco Goldschmied Foundation in memory of the teenager who was on the way to becoming an architect when he was murdered in 1993.

A Hampshire project took the award but the Waste House scooped the special prize after judges said: “It has sufficient scientific integrity to be taken seriously by the construction industry and just enough political clout to influence recycling policy. It is clear this interesting project will continue to question important issues of recycling that affect everyone.”

Award judges included Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, Doreen Lawrence CBE the mother of Stephen Lawrence, and Marco Goldschmied, RIBA Past President and Founder of the Marco Goldschmied Foundation, which established the Stephen Lawrence Prize in 1998. Baroness Lawrence visited the Waste House earlier this year.

From left to right David Pendegrass from Mears, Cat Fletcher, a founder of FREEGLE UK, and Duncan Baker-Brown.

Duncan Baker-Brown, university Senior Lecturer and the Waste House architect, said: “I hope the building industry sits up and takes notice – the Waste House is a shining example of how low-carbon homes can be built in a cost-effective way using waste, including surplus material from building sites – the construction industry discards 20 per cent of everything it uses, the equivalent of scrapping one in five houses built.”

At the awards ceremony with Duncan Baker-Brown was Professor Anne Boddington, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, Cat Fletcher, from FREEGLE, and representatives from the Mears Group which led the construction project.

The Waste House, which houses the university’s MA in Sustainable Design, locks in waste rather having it burnt, buried into landfill sites or dumped in the ocean. It is a ‘live’ research project and welcomes community groups.

Professor Julian Crampton CBE DL, 爱豆传媒 Vice-Chancellor, said: “On behalf of the entire university community I would like to congratulate everyone involved in the project.

“The Waste House has attracted huge interest nationally and globally and I am sure lessons learned from the project can be adopted by the construction industry to reduce waste, cut carbon emissions and to help combat global warming, aims that we embed in everything we do at the university.

“Reusing waste saves money for big business as well as small, and it relieves pressure on our planet. There really is no such thing as waste or surplus material – it is just stuff in the wrong place – and reusing it saves the environment by reducing the need to mine so much raw material in the first place.”

The Waste House, opened last year in the grounds of the university’s campus in Grand Parade, Brighton, was a collaborative project constructed by over 365 design and construction students using nearly 90 per cent of material that otherwise would have been thrown away.

Materials included old toothbrushes, carpet tiles, denim jeans, cycle inner tubes, video tapes, and DVDs as well as discarded bricks and wood. Design students from the university, as well as construction students from City College Brighton & Hove, were joined by apprentices from The Mears Group to construct this unique thought provoking and influential project.

The Waste House already has collected several awards including a RIBA South East Regional Award design honour and RIBA’s sustainability award in 2014.

The Architect’s Journal described the House as: “More than a space to live, work and play in, the house is a collective of experiments in which students learn by application how re-used materials can be used in construction. Some of the experiments are extraordinary: from toothbrushes used as insulation to old carpet tiles used as rainscreen cladding, sourced by FREEGLE.”

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