Christina Chrysafi wins Sustainability Prize

Date posted: June 25, 2018

Now in its fifteenth year, the ArchitecturePLB Sustainability Prize is awarded to a final year University of Portsmouth student who exemplifies a sustainable ethos within the roots of their project. The 2018 degree show had a distinct social and economic sustainable agenda with projects tackling a wide range of contextual issues to improve the urban realm. In many projects, we observed the principles of passive sustainability being at the forefront of the design rather than being an afterthought added on.

We are delighted to announce that Christina Chrysafi has won the 2018 ArchitecturePLB Sustainability Prize. Christina’s poetic proposal based on the Greek myth ‘The Tale of the Lost Girl’ was set in the abandoned industrial landscape of Elefsina (01,02). The project looked at the decline of industry, with the proposal seeking to readdress the balance of agriculture within the city. We enjoyed the fact that central to the scheme was the reuse of the old mill building which was proposed to be an agricultural research facility. We saw the potential for a lovely piece of architecture, where the history of the site was carefully considered and directly informed spaces that were interwoven between the existing urban fabric and carefully placed interventions.

We felt two other students deserved an honourable mention. Russel Gould (03), whose project was based around the ideas of allotments to establish a sustainable reclamation of a site in South London and Helen Keegan’s Museum of Secrets (04), that intricately weaved a new build museum proposal within a forgotten courtyard space in the centre of Winchester. Both schemes looked at tackling sustainability in a wider context through carefully considered proposals that linked in with the existing urban fabric.