Bartlett Alumnus Cheng-Wei Lee Named Emerging Landscape Architect of the Year 2024

The BLT Built Design Awards, established in 2021, gathers the best in architectural achievement across the built environment sector, across a range of disciplines and professional and student categories.

Cheng-Wei Lee, who studied Architectural Design MArch and graduated from The Bartlett in 2024, was selected in the Landscape Architecture category for his project Exoskeleton. For Cheng-Wei, this work was part of an intentional decision to transition across the two design disciplines: “It was about recognising the intersection between built environments and natural systems. While studying, I became increasingly interested in how landscape architecture could address ecological and environmental challenges in ways traditional architectural design couldn’t. This led me to explore projects that integrated both disciplines.”

 The project takes architectural inspiration from the hard external skeletons of arthropods, a group of invertebrates which includes insects, myriapods, arachnids and crustaceans. Cheng-Wei developed the project within his design portfolio while studying at The Bartlett. Read more about the project below.

Commenting on the award, he said:

“I'm incredibly proud to see my projects from The Bartlett School of Architecture recognised on this platform. My deepest gratitude goes to Professor Grigoriadis, whose expertise in topology optimisation has profoundly shaped my approach. I’m also grateful to my theory tutor, Professor Di Carlo, for her guidance in shaping the research direction. Huge thanks to my skills tutor, Samuel, for guiding me in mastering Houdini and integrating it with material distribution for this project.”

Exoskeletons

by Cheng-Wei Lee
Architectural Design MArch, RC8, 2024

This experimental project investigates the structure and morphological principles of arthropods’ exoskeletons as a source of exploration for new construction compounds in landscape architecture.

Exoskeletons is a lightweight structure that fuses advancements in additive manufacturing with bio-inspired computational design. These internal geometry form the structure, which varies in density and orientation according to a homeostatic load-responsive process, which makes them adapt to local strain levels within a structure.

A custom algorithmic workflow was developed to mimic this load-responsive method for designing gridshell structures, which are locally optimised in topology, orientation, and section to maximise material efficiency.

The structural are arranged following principal stress lines and change their thickness and topology following a topology optimisation map. A sequence of topology optimisation process iterations. This is based on loads and structure constraint inputs for the analysis. A distributed load of was applied over the anticlastic shell, and fixed supports were assumed on the two edges lying on the ground.

Cheng-Wei has also been interviewed in Design Magazine about the project, his design process and considerations, and his expectations for the future of additive manufacturing and bio-inspired computational design.

Cheng-Wei was tutored in Architectural Design MArch’s Research Cluster 8 by Kostas Grigoriadis. His theory tutor was Ilaria Di Carlo, and his skills tutors were Samuel Esses, Hanjun Kim and Alvaro Lopez.

More information

• Find out more about Cheng-Wei Lee’s winning project
• Explore all the winners at this year’s awards
• Read the interview with Cheng-Wei Lee in Design Magazine
• Discover our Landscape Architecture programmes at The Bartlett

Image: ‘Exoskeletons’ by Cheng-Wei Lee, Architectural Design MArch, RC8, 2024