The Krystyna Johnson Scottish Ecological Design Association Awards to second year students in Scottish Schools of Architecture.

Our congratulations go to Marco Zaccaria of Year Two, who was nominated as Strathclyde's entrant for the Krystyna Johnston SEDA Award 2015. His project was selected to be in the final shortlist of 5 entries, the overall winner was Olivia Page from the Mackintosh School of Architecture.

The Krystyna Johnson SEDA Award 2015

The Scottish Ecological Design Association (SEDA) relaunched the Krystyna Johnson Award (the original fund was used for travelling scholarships), to recognise outstanding projects in ecological design. A tutor at both of the schools of architecture in Glasgow and an architect with ASSIST, Krystyna Johnson passed away in 2003. Her colleague and husband Jim Johnson formed a trust in her memory.

The Lighthouse Exhibition runs until 13 January, 2016, on Level 2, 11 Mitchell Lane, G1 3NU

Further information, opening times and dates can be found on the Architecture + Design Scotland website. The shortlisted students were congratulated at an event in Lighthouse, Glasgow. This years exhibition of selected students' work was opened with the inaugural Howard Liddell lecture. Professor Sandy Halliday of Gaia Research launched a series of lectures dedicated to her late husband. Paying respect to eco-pioneers, she will question whether, with everything to gain, ecological design is still marginalised and largely perceived as counter cultural.

2015 is the award's fourth year. Projects put forward in 2015 ranged both in content and location, they included a biking centre in Inverness; a futuristic library in St Andrews; a place of shelter in Beith; an ecological primary school; and an Edinburgh community brewery.

The work on show in the Lighthouse represents the intention of the award to recognise sustainable design by students 'still growing into architecture'. All five Scottish schools of architecture were asked to put forward a relevant current project from their curriculum and every school answered the call. Projects varied widely both in content and location. The five Scottish schools are also joined by Sheffield School of Architecture as an annually invited guest from outside Scotland.

SEDA's representatives, usually an architect, visited each Department and selected a student to go forward. Once again we were visited by Nick Dominney from Hoskins Architects who selected Marco's work.  Nick also kindly delivered a lecture to Year 2 about ecological design and the students were invited to embrace these principles in their semester 2 project, A Study Library in St. Andrews.

David MacRitchhie is our Year Two Director. He commented on Marco's entry,

This project was a wonderful response to the brief and the site. It was based on a timber gridshell structure resulting in a humane and bright environment for a study space, and his sophisticated presentation was greatly admired. This is one in a series of achievements by Marco including a GIA award commendation and a mention in an international student competition for a Cinema Museum in Rome.

SEDA's Chris Stewart of Collective Architecture, reported;

The final deliberation was made at SEDA’s annual conference in Creetown near Dumfries, where we welcomed some of the individual winners. Those students that managed to come along had the opportunity to present their proposals and Marco was able to present his own entry in person.

Marco Zaccaria's project will be shown in detail in our Awards Gallery.

Our 2014 winner was Niklavs Krievs, his Library Project is featured in the Awards Gallery.