Architectural drawing celebrated with an annual prize at Sir John Soane’s Museum

The winner of the second annual Architecture Drawing Prize has been annouced as Li Han, one of the founding partners of Drawing Architecture Studio in Beijing. His work was chosen by the judges for telling ‘hundreds of stories’ through a single piece of artwork and drawing attention to how architects should consider the lifetime of a building across a period of time: ‘It's a modern day Archigram drawing but also a step into the future,’ says Narinder Sagoo, one of the judges and senior partner at Foster + Partners.

Han's drawing, titled ‘The Samsara of Building No. 42 on Dirty Street’, pictures a ‘chronological visual narrative’ of the development of a building in Beijing over a period of nearly 10 years, from a residential building into a commercial venue for businesses, then back again into a residential building. The drawing takes on the role of a document that explores the relationship between social and political urban development.

Li Han, The Samsara of Building No.42 on Dirty  Street, 2017

The prize, curated by the World Architecture Festival, Sir John Soane’s Museum and Make Architects, looks to embrace digital drawing tools used within architecture while also celebrating the enduring use of hand drawing to the practice. The three prize sections – ‘hand-drawing’, ‘hybrid’, and ‘digital still image’ – express this, separating the types of drawing to recognise the unique skills required for each.

While Han won the digital category, and also was the overall winner, the other two category winners were Lukas Göbl of Austrian practice göbl architektur in the ‘hybrid’ category and Carlijn Kingma of Studio Carlijn Kingma in the ‘hand-drawn’ category.

Lukas Göbl, City of Beautiful Bodies, 2016

Farshid Moussavi, founder of Farshid Moussavi Architecture and a judge for the prize commended Göbl’s drawing for its ‘power of intuition’ and as an example of hand drawings as a ‘successful design and thinking tool’. His ongoing series examines the role of utopia in today's society, seeing utopia as a process, more than a destination. While Ken Shuttleworth, founder of Make Architects and judge, praised the detail, shading and depth of Kingma’s drawing that recasts the story of The Tower of Babel in the context of modern capitalism.

Other highlights included the commended drawings ‘American Dream or American Nightmare’ by Yue Ma of Cornell University and  ‘Embassy Nation’ by Sarmad Suhail of Bartlett School of Architecture from across the categories. 

INFORMATION

The Architecture Drawing Prize is on view until 18 November 2018. For more information, see the Sir John Soane’s Museum website