Alumna Yuen-Wah Williams Collects the Student Prize in the Architecture Today Awards

In an awards ceremony in November at Battersea Power Station, Bartlett graduate Yuen-Yah Williams was awarded the Student Prize at the third annual Architecture Today Awards.

The awards were established in 2022 with a focus on celebrating longevity and sustainability over novelty. They invite submissions from projects that have been in use for at least three years and which can demonstrate a strong track record for delivering on their environmental, functional, community and cultural ambitions. In the student category, they look for proposals that adapt an existing building or give active consideration to issues of adaptability, flexibility and building performance over time.

Yuen-Wah Williams’ winning project, Docklands Heronry, confronts the growing abandonment of office space in the Canary Wharf area, built up since the 1980s as London’s futuristic financial hub. Incorporating urban greening, re-use and social housing, the proposal wards off future desolation by cleverly repurposing the area in inventive ways that can benefit surrounding human and ecological communities.

Commenting on the project, the judges said:

“Yuen-Wah Williams’ beautifully drawn proposals suggest elegant ways to incorporate mixed uses into existing buildings and transform the public realm. Grounded in a mature understanding of Canary Wharf’s development and the mechanics and constraints of office conversion, the project is both visionary and entirely believable.”

Docklands Heronry, London

by Yuen-Wah Williams
Architecture March, PG12, 2024

In 2023, the Financial Times revealed that office vacancies in the US and London were at 20-year highs. This has directly affected Canary Wharf, a financial district in the site of London’s former docklands.

In the 1980s, the London Docklands Development Company replaced redundant warehouses and dock infrastructure with late-twentieth-century North American office blocks. It is now increasingly likely that these office blocks will become obsolete, forcing the Docklands into a second dereliction. Office tenants are choosing not to renew their 25-year leases, meaning that Canary Wharf will be left with ‘stranded assets’ that require creative retrofit for the development to succeed long-term. This project focuses on several strategies for regeneration including re-use, urban greening, social housing and the University of Research, Retrofit and Re-Use.

Docklands Heronry responds to a very current problem of what to do with all the single-use, rigid structures that will be left behind once companies move away from the typical modern office.

Yuen-Wah Williams graduated Architecture MArch in 2024. She studied in unit PG12, with design unit tutors Professor Barbara Campbell-Lange and Professor Elizabeth Dow, and year 5 thesis tutor Professor Peter Bishop. Her winning project was also exhibited at The Bartlett Summer Show 2024.

More information

• Explore Yuen-Wah Williams’ winning project at the Bartlett Summer Show Archive
• Read more about the Architecture Today Awards
• Learn more about Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2)

Images: ‘Docklands Heronry, London’, by Yuen-Wah Williams, Architecture March, PG12, 2024