Watch: AJ Small Projects Sustainability webinar

The AJ Small Projects Sustainability webinar, chaired by AJ sustainability editor Hattie Hartman, considered the importance of environmental and social sustainability in the success of projects on smaller budgets.

Recent exemplar projects shortlisted for the AJ Small Projects Award were presented and discussed by their designers, including the 2022 Sustainability Prize-winner Darren Bray of Studio BAD, talking about the studio’s St Margaret’s Church community hub project.

He was joined by Summer Islam and Daria Moatazed-Keivani of non-for-profit organisation Material Cultures, who talked about their use of experimental materials on Block House in Somerset, which was also shortlisted for the award.

The discussion explored issues around innovative use of materials and methods of retrofitting, reduction of embodied and operational carbon, collaboration and the embedding of social worth – underlining the importance of sustainability in the entries to the AJ Small Projects Award.

Next year’s AJ Small Projects Award, run in association with Marley, is now open for entries. More details on the award and how to enter can be found here.

Now in its 28th year, the annual award celebrates completed projects with a contract value of £350,000 and under. The bar has been raised again this year to reflect inflation and to ensure we can continue to celebrate the rich diversity of projects on a low budget.

Since they were first launched in 1996, the intention of the award has remained the same: to give much-deserved recognition to schemes realised at a more modest cost. From home extensions to workspaces, restaurants to shop fit-outs, pavilions to small houses, architects all over the country are busy working on projects that may not make headlines but nevertheless provide a real indication of the depth of design talent across the UK today.

In 2022, Akin Studio was named winner of the AJ Small Projects Award in 2022 for its self-build ‘tree house’ in rural Herefordshire. A separate social sustainability prize was awarded to St Margaret's Church by Studio BAD, an incremental redevelopment of a church 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’.

All the projects entered for the award will be featured in the AJ Buildings Library and the 20 shortlisted projects will be published in the AJ in April 2023.

The deadline for entries is 27 January 2023. Entry cost for AJ Small Projects is £80.

Source:Richard Chivers

St Margaret’s Church by Studio BAD

The webinar is sponsored by