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Bartlett Student Wins RIBA Journal’s Eye Line Drawing Competition 2023
4 July 2023
Chia-Yi Chou was named the first place winner in the Student division of the prestigious competition with her 2022 Architecture MArch project.
The RIBA Journal Eye Line Competition rewards technical skill and imaginative flair in architectural drawing and rendering. Held annually, the free-to-enter competition is open to students and practitioners, gathering the most accomplished work from around the world. Student work is eligible if it was produced within the last three years while in architectural education.
Now in its eleventh year, the competition’s top Student prize went to Bartlett student Chia-Yi Chou, for her Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2) Year 4 project ‘Foreston Keynes: Carbon Capture in a Progressive New Town’. A man-made, cuboid structure captures carbon dioxide from the ambient air, more effectively than a natural forest due to its dramatically larger and more efficient surface area. Her project also won the Design Realisation: Experimental Innovation Prize at last year’s Bartlett Summer Show. The project takes inspiration from fractal geometry, and calls to mind the infinite possibilities of hyperobjects. Chia-Yi used complex folding drawing as an experiment to explore collage and scale, and to unfold a journey through the infrastructure, with panels on each surface of the cube opening out to reveal many more three-dimensional layers.
‘Foreston Keynes: Carbon Capture in a Progressive New Town’
Chia-Yi Chou, Architecture March (ARB/RIBA Part 2), PG11, Y4
Milton Keynes has always been an experimental city that heralds bold future-proofing schemes. Aligned with the city's ambition to hold a leading role in integrating green technology, the Milton Keynes Council launches an exemplar infrastructure - The Forest - to capture carbon dioxide and carbon credit.
The Forest captures carbon dioxide from the ambient air like a real forest, with its large surface being a thousand times more efficient than an authentic woodland. The timber structure sequestrates carbon dioxide during construction. Being a new green space responding to the urban planning of Central Milton Keynes, it is a public space that reveals and demonstrates the human-induced carbon cycles. The infrastructure is a living ecosystem that synchronises with Central Milton Keynes, supplying waste heat to the area. The skin of the building unveils the carbon capture process to the city at a monumental scale.
The project explores integrating and displaying new environmental technologies in an urban environment as radical infrastructure. 50 years from its birth, The Forest erects a new progressive icon that celebrates and reshapes the modernist new town.
Commenting on Chia-Yi’s winning entry, the judges said:
“I love this as an idea of how you can make a drawing, big in both thinking and presentation. It’s pulling everything out from two-dimensionality into three in a way that is totally engaging.”
- Rana Begum
“It’s extremely skilful in terms of its drafting and use of colour, and whether it is [a sculpture] or not, it conveys the impression of a three dimensional model.”
- Alan Power
“She’s doing absolutely everything that we want her to do. Experimenting on a climate future while referencing past aesthetics; attempting a DIY 3D approach layered onto beautiful drawings. For me it blows the other entries out of the park.”
- Jes Fernie
Chia-Yi Chou graduated this year from Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2) and was tutored in unit PG11 by Laura Allen and Mark Smout. After graduating, she also won the Year 5 Portfolio Prize and The Bartlett School of Architecture Medal, MArch. You can see her more recent work at this year’s Bartlett Summer Show, open now until Saturday 08 July.
More information
- Read more about Chia-Yi Chou’s winning entry at RIBA Journal
- Explore her project at The Bartlett Summer Show 2022 Show Archive
- Visit The Bartlett Summer Show 2023
- Find out more about Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2)
Images: ‘Foreston Keynes: Carbon Capture in a Progressive New Town’ by Chia-Yi Chou, Architecture March, PG11, Y4