Two projects at Mackintosh School of Architecture honoured

Sheppard Robson has awarded £1,000 of prize money to students at Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh School of Architecture.

Zichao Chen won £500 for the best part 2 project in fifth year and Jack Taylor also won £500 for the best part 1 project in third year.

James Dick, who leads Sheppard Robson’s Scottish office, said: “Zichao’s project was not only visually dramatic and striking but thought provoking regarding inner city retail and existing shopping centres generally.

“His approach was to deconstruct, piece by piece and over time, a typical bland mega shopping centre in Dublin, but at the same time maintaining a commercial awareness. This has created an architecture that has a greater sense of townscape that knits better into the tight urban grain of Dublin.”

“Jack Taylor’s work, meanwhile, took a very different and considered approach to the main street of Penicuik. Whilst many students focused on a particular building, Jack has thought very carefully about the streetscape itself and his project seeks to create interesting hard landscape and building interventions to enliven the route for the pedestrian through the town.

“He also had a very bold and poetic design for a writing retreat at Little Sparta, the garden of artist Ian Hamilton Finlay.”