Bartlett Alumnus Wins at the AR Future Projects Awards 2022

The awards spotlight architectural projects still on the drawing board or under construction, celebrating the possibilities offered by tomorrow’s cities and the potential for progressive contributions to communities, neighbourhoods and urban landscapes around the world.

The Student Prize is one of two new categories added this year that recognise speculative proposals that will not be built (together with ‘unsuccessful' competition entries), with the the organisers of the awards noting that ‘there is much to be learned from…the radical and experimental ideas’ in this category.

Elliot won the Student Prize for his project 'Forgetting Whitehall; Casting Blackhall’, which was his final year Architecture March (ARB/RIBA Part 2) project. The project also achieved a Distinction, and was exhibited at last year’s Bartlett Summer Show.

Commenting on his project, the AR editors described it as: 

“A reminder that even a seemingly rigid immovable city such as London is always being made and unmade. The attention and subversion of the local history and character, as well as a concern for the texture and feel of both the room and the street, is a human response in the face of larger hostile forces.”

‘Forgetting Whitehall; Casting Blackhall’

Elliot Nash, Architecture March, PG12, Year 5, 2021

Blackhall proposes a building which subverts methods of physical and non-physical preservation, to fold time through a site in pursuit of a kind of rewilded London.

The project moves through themes of redaction and the veil, transience and the cast, and ideas of the counter monument to arrive at an architecture which opposes contemporary thought and practice around conservation.

Blackhall is a small building in Whitehall, whose construction is grounded in the ephemeral qualities of the site. The project asks how concrete can be used to remember things which are formally forgotten: protest placards are employed for seat cushions, footsteps and hoof prints are visible in the cast walls, and the plinths of demounted statues prop the building up in a kind of historic present. Poetic methods and mediums of construction are pursued to remember material and invisible histories.

Elliot graduated Architecture MArch in 2021, and was part of PG12, tutored by Jonathan Hill and Elizabeth Dow. 

More information

• Read more about the awards at Architectural Review
• Explore Elliot Nash’s project in the Future Projects Catalogue
• Find out more about Elliot Nash’s project in The Bartlett Summer Show 2021 
• Find out more about Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2)

Image: ‘Forgetting Whitehall; Casting Blackhall’ by Elliot Nash, Architecture March, PG12, Year 5, 2021