Northern Design Competition

Andrew Green
Architectural Design Winner 2008
(Interviewed 12th November 2009)

"Winning the Northern Design Competition in 2008 heightened my ambition to pursue a career in Architecture. My entry was my third year design thesis, a plan for a Seasonal Affective Disorder Rehabilitation Centre in Reykjavik Iceland. It seems bizarre, but in retrospect, after being announced as the winner I remember a feeling of intense euphoria. It was incredible to finally get recognition for my work and helped to rationalise my intense dedication.

The awards evening and exhibition provided me with a great opportunity to meet other interesting creatives and the feedback I received from the judges was extremely encouraging. I am still in touch with some of the people I met at the awards event so as a networking platform the whole experience has been very rewarding. Having my award winning work subsequently featured in an Architectural Journal came with much kudos.

Since winning the competition I returned to University to undertake a Postgraduate Diploma in Architecture at the University of Westminster in London and at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. On my way home from Australia I stopped off in Japan for two weeks to undertake an architectural tour from Tokyo to Hiroshima. It was incredibly inspiring to see works from architects such as Kazuyo Sejima, Jun Aoki and FOA. When I got back to the UK I spent the summer working for Blueprint Magazine in London.

More recently I have returned to the north to complete my postgraduate studies at Lincoln School of Architecture. My design thesis is loosely based around dyslexia, literature and the imagination and I am currently looking for a site in Yerevan, Armenia to base the project.

When I won the Architectural Design category in the competition, I was on my year out placement working for Ian Simpson Architects in Manchester. The experience was incredibly rewarding and subsequently instilled in me the aspiration to inaugurate my own practice. Over the past year I have begun putting together a comprehensive business plan and concept structure for my own architectural design studio."