Architecture Drawing Prize 2018

Winners and shortlisted entries on show at the Soane Museum

Three winners of the 2018 Architecture Drawing Prize have been announced and will be exhibited, along with 14 shortlisted entries, at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London until 26 November.

Awards are made in three categories, for hand drawings, digital images and hybrid images.

Digital category and overall winner

The overall winner was Li Han, a founding partner at Beijing’s Drawing Architecture Studio, for his work ‘The Samsara of Building No. 42 on Dirty Street’. The project – which also won in the ‘digital’ category – is a chronological visual narrative of the development of a residential building in Beijing, China between 2008 and 2017, and uses drawing to examine the relationship between civil society and the state in urban development.

Hand-drawn category winner

Carlijn Kingma of Studio Carlijn Kingma won in the ‘hand-drawn’ category for ‘The Babylonian Tower of Modernity’. The drawing “recasts the story of the Tower of Babel in the light of the modern religion of capitalism” says the architect. It addresses the idea that social media and the new tools of digital communication are leading to an ever more polarised society and public sphere, at odds with the technological dream of progress.

Hybrid category winner

Lukas Göbl of Austrian practice göbl architektur ZT won in the ‘hybrid’ category for ‘City of Beautiful Bodies’. The drawing is part of an ongoing drawing project dedicated to the idea of utopia and its role in today’s society. Following Paul Klee’s motto, ‘Not a day without a line’, it treats utopia as a process as much as a destination.

This is the second cycle of the annual prize, which is run by Make Architects and the World Architecture Festival (WAF). The jury comprised Make founder Ken Shuttleworth, WAF curator Jeremy Melvin, Soane Museum curator Owen Hopkins, artists Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, Barber Institute of Fine Arts director Nicola Kalinsky, Narinder Sagoo (senior partner at Foster & Partners) and Farshid Mousaavi (Farshid Moussavi Architects).

Visit the Soane Museum website for details of the exhibition.