:: TheSpotBrief ::

Your chance to go beyond the conventional

- Register

- Brief

Judging The Spot

The Results...

Emap's impressive new headquarters in central London was the venue for the final judging of The Spot garden shed competition.

The host, editor of Architects' Journal Online and the magazine's special projects correspondent, Ruth Slavid, were joined by Amir Sanei, founder of Sanei Hopkins Architects, and Alastair Parvin, who will be familiar to many of you as the winner of the first Line of Site design competition.

The judging process was straight forward. Initially, every one of the submitted entries was closely scrutinised against the requirements of the brief: this took in the clarity of each submission, its scope and the architectural merit of each proposal. From this initial sifting, the entries that made it through to the second round were subjected to a far more rigorous examination, the judges considering cultural context, spatial definition and lines of inspiration.

Overall, not an easy task given the high quality of all the submitted proposals.

Eventually, after many hours pouring over the entries (as you can hopefully see from the pictures above), a shortlist of six was decided from which the overall winner would be chosen. These were from:

Alexander Allen

Anders Linde

Ann Morris

Dionysus Cho

Carly Greenway

Maria de la Guardia

The difficulty now facing the judges was considerable: balancing the pragmatic with the emotional to select a winner. A task that took over two hours of very hard debate!

Our winner drew the following comments from the judges:

Ruth Slavid:

"An alluring sketch that sets the scene perfectly for the proposal which itself stands out as completely different."
"A proposal with universal appeal."

Amir Sanei:

"An intelligent idea that is well presented, drawing the reader's mind into the concept."
"A concept that has aesthetic sensibilities - all generic considerations have been included as a result."

Alastair Parvin:

"A charming proposal which presents a familiar idea in a setting in which it feels right."
"The presentation, although lacking impact, draws you in and allows the proposal to flourish."

The winning design was titled 'Re-Tyre' and was submitted by Carly Greenway.

Read a short biography from Carly, her inspiration for the winning design and see her receiving her prizes.
Many congratulations.

It was agreed by all the judges that this winning concept 'sat eloquently between the ends cultural/utilitarian design spectrum so well defined by the esoteric proposals presented by the runners-up'.

Those runners up were:

Alexander Allen - '20:01, a spatial odyssey'
"A gritty proposition that relishes its engagement with the environment."
"An exercise in total social escapism in which physical pieces of architecture define the space."

Anders Linde - 'Slice'
"A beautifully executed proposal. A pure architectural solution and a sensory feast."
"Its engagement with the setting sets no limits to the evolutionary possibilities."

Our congratulations again go to Alexander and Anders - it was remarkably close!

So where was that shed??

Right at the outset of The Spot we asked if anyone could guess where the picture of the shed at the top of the home page was taken. Well quite a few of you took up the challenge. Several guesses were way off, but in the main you were all in the right neck of the woods.

The picture was actually taken in Stornoway in the Western Isles of Scotland.

Two people got the closest:
Tushar Desai
Maria de la Guardia

Congratulations to you both, particularly to Maria who was also shortlisted for her shed design, intriguingly entitled 'Fishing for Life in the City'.

Again, from behalf of everyone involved with the competition, thank you for all you efforts, the shed challenge is one that we will no doubt be returning to in the not too distant future.

The Spot Team