This news item is from the Bartlett School of Architecture.
The UCL Sustainability Awards, held in mid-July at UCL East, brought together 200 staff and students to celebrate the people and projects driving positive environmental change across the university. The event marked the fourteenth year of the awards and UCL’s bicentenary year, highlighting sustainability’s role in the university’s past, present and into the future.
The Sustainability Education Award celebrates staff or postgraduate students who have integrated sustainability into either the formal or informal curriculum, whether through the development of academic courses or voluntary programmes, or community involvement schemes. This year’s award went to Bio-Integrated Design MArch/MSc course leaders and founders, Dr Brenda Parker (UCL Biochemical Engineering) and Professor Marcos Cruz (Professor of Innovative Environments, the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL), on behalf of their team.
The construction industry is one of the world’s largest contributors to carbon emissions, and current approaches to designing, building and occupying our built environment are increasingly unsustainable – particularly as global building stock is expected to double over the next three decades. Brenda and Marcos established these two future-facing master’s degrees to meet this challenge.
The awarding team said, “The winners of our Sustainability Education Award have shown outstanding leadership by establishing the pioneering Bio-ID [courses]. Their work has transformed how future architects and designers engage with sustainability and living systems.”
The two degrees combine bio-engineering and the study of the built environment, offering a radical, interdisciplinary curriculum drawing from biotechnology, ecology, biomaterials, advanced manufacturing and computation to develop innovative design solutions for the built environment of the future. The MArch is design-led, tailored for those from architecture or design disciplines, and centres on architectural innovation, design simulation, and creative exploration. The MSc is science-focused, suited for students from scientific or technical backgrounds, and emphasises laboratory research, computational modelling and material experimentation.
Both courses place nature at the heart of the design process, integrating biological, material and social systems to create more sustainable ways of living. Through an evidence-based approach, students are empowered to develop and test new design strategies that respond to the urgent environmental challenges facing our cities and communities.
The award recognises the efforts of our fantastic ecology of people who have pioneered interdisciplinary education on the course, and our teaching team’s commitment to regenerative design practices that merge biotechnology and the built environment.”
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