Judges

Allan Sylvester (Dip Arch, Arb) studied architecture at the University of North London (now the London Metropolitan University, home to The Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design) and at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.Co-founded Ullmayer Sylvester Architects with Silvia Ullmayer following a collaborative self-build project that established the foundation of the practice’s ethos and approach. 

Allan is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Westminster School of Architecture and Cities, where he teaches on the BA Interior Architecture course. Alongside his architectural practice and teaching, he produces drone videography and films on architecture.

Andrew is a Board Director at Buckley Gray Yeoman and is a Chartered Architect with over 18 years practice experience across a wide range of sectors that include Workplace, Residential, Education, Hospitality and Retail throughout the UK & Europe. Andrew’s main field of architectural interest lies in the sustainable reuse and retrofit of existing buildings. Andrew seeks to promote the benefits that the ‘retrofit-first’ approach brings to all existing built fabric to reduce carbon emissions and using fewer resources.

He is currently overseeing several large developments across the UK. These include: The Shepherd Hotel, Mayfair London, that comprises a 2-storey top extension in CLT of the existing hotel building to provide a completely remodelled 82 key boutique hotel, which sits alongside the restoration of the Grade II listed Georgian corner terrace that delivers 16 private residential apartments. Colmore Gate, Birmingham. A prominent 1990's post-modern office tower & podium retrofit in the heart of Birmingham city business district that will be sustainably rejuvenated to create a 200,000 SqFt active Grade-A workplace campus. 1 Georges Square, Bristol, a 160,000 SqFt retrofit of an existing office building that delivers a city-centre headquarters for a British tech firm. 151 Shaftesbury Avenue London, the modernisation of the early 2000’s office building that comprises top extension with eternal amenity, a new high-performance façade and low-energy services to create a highly sustainable repurposed central London office building.

Andrew also chairs the New London Architecture expert panel for Retrofit and Conservation. This is a specialist knowledge generating think-tank comprising industry leaders where the challenges and issues around retrofit are considered and debated.

Asif is Director of Regenerative Design at Perkins&Will. He has raised the profile of carbon proficiency in the practice which includes a costed Zero Carbon Report at the end of concept design for all architectural projects. He has been advocating the use of circularity in design and as part of interiors provides a Life Cycle Analysis for all projects and a roadmap to achieving full circularity by 2030. He has also been involved in expanding the firm's environmental remit within designs as part of the 'Living Design' initiative utilising a multivalent approach rather than singular metrics.

Asif is an Architect with over 20 years' experience in delivering Zero Carbon design projects. Notably BedZED and Jubilee Wharf in Penryn, Cornwall. He has worked in the UK and abroad in China and the Middle East. He has a PhD in Life Cycle design of buildings from Cass School of Art and Design at LMU.

Basil is Managing Partner of FORE Partnership, the purpose-driven real estate private equity firm that drives social and environmental innovation in the built environment using low carbon strategies, social impact, place making, and design. Prior to founding FORE, Basil was a partner at Capricorn Investment Group, the family office of Jeff Skoll (eBay), and was Managing Partner of a German property fund. He spent 13 years in investment banking in New York and London. Basil is Chair of the children’s charity, the Institute of Imagination, and sits on the board of trustees of the UK Green Building Council, the property industry’s largest membership organisation dedicated to sustainability. He graduated with a degree in Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University.

Ben founded Moxon Architects in 2004, growing it into a dynamic, cross-disciplinary studio working on projects across the UK and overseas.

Working at the intersection of architecture, craft and engineering, Ben is interested in how landscape and heritage can inform design, and how architects can integrate circularity into new schemes.

He has built a reputation for technical achievement and aesthetic versatility and is well known for fostering an inquisitive and collaborative design process.

With strategic and design oversight across all projects, his work always represents a bespoke response to client aspirations, user needs, technical requirements and geographical context.

Ben’s particular expertise lies in creating projects that respond to and enhance their surroundings. Working across multiple sectors, from hospitality to public infrastructure, he works with clients including Hauser & Wirth, HS2 and Transport Scotland.

Ben lectures at universities in Europe and across the UK and is an external examiner at University of Dundee. He previously ran a Bartlett Degree Unit, exploring real-world design challenges and construction methods, and during this time his students received awards including the RIBA Undergraduate Medal, the RIBA Dissertation Medal, RIBA Serjeant Award and the UCL Donaldson Medal.

Outside of practice Ben is a member of the Braemar Mountain Rescue Team, and his landscape photography has been published by Scottish Mountaineering Press, Phaidon and the Financial Times.

Ben Addy is based at the Scottish office.

Studio Tashima is a London-based studio of architects and designers known for their intuitive and responsive architecture. Their signature is the resourceful adaptation of existing materials and structures, conjuring new uses and atmospheres rich in quality and experience. Seeing their designs as just one of the many phases in a building's life, the studio’s concept of ‘a living architecture’ reflects a deep appreciation for the built and natural environments while bringing something new.

Charles Tashima was born in New York City and studied at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and Harvard University GSD. Upon graduating with the thesis prize in 1991, he received a Kennedy Travelling Fellowship to follow LeCobusier’s ‘grand tour’ of 1911. Here, he focussed on the study of vernacular architecture and materials through Eastern Europe, Turkey and Greece.

Charles’ collaborative approach has come from his extensive experience teaching design internationally. He began at the ETH-Zurich while working in the practice of Meili Peter Architekten. Since then, he has been a visiting critic at a number of schools and taught at the EPFL-Lausanne and The Architectural Association, London, where he was Academic Head and a tutor for nearly 15 years. While teaching, he founded his practice, Studio Tashima, in 1999.

Chris provides 16+ years’ experience. As a design director he contributes a broad strategic expertise from across AKT II’s global retrofit portfolio: from the unprecedented restoration at Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings, and the forthcoming retrofit of London’s Cambridge House Hotel on Piccadilly and New

Zealand House in St. James’s with The Crown Estate.

In western England, Chris has overseen the transformative heritage regeneration at Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings: the world’s first iron-framed building. The project has received a plethora of awards, including the prestigious European Heritage Europa Nosta Award in Conservation and Adaptive Reuse.

Here in London, Chris has been running and supporting The Crown Estate’s, New Zealand House transformation project. Chris has instilled in the design team the need to work with the existing structure over his eight years on the project, which has led to less than 10% of the structure needing remodelling, while still delivering a rejuvenated first class building. On Piccadilly, Chris has championed the redevelopment of the listed old In and Out Club, into the forthcoming Cambridge House Hotel, where the 1760’s villa, once home to one of our past Prime Ministers will be converted into London’s next boutique hotel as the hotel sits next to the Piccadilly Line, a complex scheme of acoustic isolation was drawn up where the Grade I and Grade II buildings all now float on over 550 bearings. Most recently, Chris has begun contributing to the transformation of the former Ku Klux Klan auditorium in Fort Worth, Texas, where repurposing a monument to hate will become a beacon of truth-telling, reparative justice, and liberation.

Across all these varied contexts, he’s been championing the maximum reuse of each site’s existing structure – applying a ‘first principles’ approach – to help drive a unified AEC response to the climate crisis. This approach has earned Chris a spot on Buildings 40 under 40 list in 2025.

David Green has been associated with Belsize Architects for 30 years and a director for half that time. A significant part of Belsize Architects’ portfolio has involved work on existing buildings. The built environment is in his blood as his engineer father worked at the Building Research Establishment (before its privatization) on innovation in the use of concrete. In addition to his role at Belsize Architects, where he champions sustainability, he has also made public contributions to built environment policy, most recently contributing to the Don’t Waste Buildings initiative which is seeking to influence political opinion to ensure our existing stock of buildings is used in the best way possible, both for citizens and for the global environment.

He is not a qualified architect, but was educated as a classicist and then economist at Cambridge and the University of Wales. He had an earlier career in the Bank of England, IMF, FSA and FRC and has co-authored books on global financial regulation and on central banking. In consequence the economics of the construction industry is a particular interest, as is the role of financial incentives in promoting the reuse of the existing stock of buildings.

Dr Ruth Lang is an architect, researcher, curator, and head of the MArch programme at the London School of Architecture. Through her teaching and writing, her work explores how contemporary architectural practice can be restructured to more equitably address issues of diversity and the Climate Emergency, using collaborative and transdisciplinary research strategies. She was lead researcher for the Future Observatory’s Low Carbon Housing project at the Design Museum, and her book ‘Building for Change: The Architecture of Creative Reuse' was published by gestalten in 2022.

Eoin co-founded London based ConForm Architects in 2017, with the practice working across the residential, cultural, retail, public, conservation, commercial and office sectors. The practice has established a reputation for transformative, considered architecture and interiors that investigate and interrogate both context and form. Such projects include the AJ Retrofit Award winning Smithson Tower fitout within the iconic Grade II* Listed Economist Building, a hotel and wedding venue conversion in the Loire Valley and the ongoing redesign and an exciting theatre in Surrey.

Graham is a director of Prewett Bizley Architects who are commitment to radically reducing the energy consumption of buildings, with extensive experience in delivering sustainable new-build and retrofit projects using Passivhaus construction methodologies.

Graham has written regularly for various architectural journals and is the author of two books on architectural detailing published by the Architectural Press.  He is a part-time teaching fellow at the University of Bath.

Hero is Max Fordham’s Sustainability Director and leader of the 'MF: Beyond Net Zero' strategy group. Joining the practice in 2008 with a background in engineering and physics, Hero has since set and delivered pioneering sustainability strategies on projects across a wide range of sectors, and is now one of the leading voices in the UK construction industry’s response to the climate emergency.

She is experienced in all leading environmental certification schemes, whole life carbon reduction, and the circular economy, as well as wellbeing, low carbon environmental design, and masterplanning strategies. She is an expert facilitator, using her knowledge and experience to help clients explore, define, and achieve their sustainability aspirations.

On all her projects, Hero is motivated by the need to feel more connected to people and to create buildings with low environmental impact for happy lives.

Externally, Hero makes regular contributions to the wider agenda, including the development of the ‘Sustainability Matrix' - a communication tool which has been adopted by the industry to help set sustainability briefs on construction projects. She is a regular awards judge, a sustainability expert for the RIBA National Awards Group, and sits on the ACE Climate Action Group and the Greater Cambridgeshire and Suffolk Design Review Panels. She is a BREEAM Accredited Professional, Chartered Construction Manager and Chartered Environmentalist.

Jon brings nearly 30 years of experience designing retrofit projects that place sustainability and social value at their core. As Managing Director of Barr Gazetas since 2016, he leads the practice’s approach to low‑carbon design and works across a diverse portfolio for clients including The Crown Estate, Grosvenor, British Land and M+G.

He focuses on creating inclusive, sustainable places through retrofit and creative reuse for both people and the planet, staying closely involved in projects and contributing to the practice’s net‑zero strategies. In particular, he led the delivery of Holbein Gardens, the first Grade II listed building to achieve BREEAM Outstanding in the UK, which set a benchmark for office retrofit and stands as one of London’s most sustainable workplaces.

Architecture offers a vocabulary of different professional lives within one field. It is a field in which you can develop yourself and concoct a route towards a manifesto of ideas, underpinning an architecture of our time.

The profession has a duty to conserve our present cultural fabric by way of sensitive adaption, renewal, alteration, amendment, extension or reconfiguration. Conservation and repair brings with it the joy of meeting the long dead architectural mind of the original designer through intense study and the built work. We have to respond to the value of the existing building fabric by using our architectural intelligence and understanding. We do not need a special label. We are architects, not space planners or old building experts or developers' hacks or designers of follies.

There is also the recognition that the language of architecture and cultural artefacts applies equally to the new and the old - I don’t see a distinction between designing a building and designing the repair of a building. To design a new door is identical to the process of repairing an old door within an adopted set of criteria. Each project demands an orderly mind to establish an approach.

Satisfaction also arises from working with fellow professionals who share a willingness to engage with existing and new fabric in a serious intelligent and knowledgeable fashion. Simply asking the client what they want abdicates the need for informed debate and the giving of professional advice. All parties need to grasp a level of understanding equal to the significance of the design task in hand. The absolute responsibility of each contributor cannot be delegated.

The greatest obstacle to communication in any specialist sector of a profession is the distance the generalist needs to travel to reach a level of meaningful engagement with the specialist. The generalist architect isn’t trained in the field of conservation. We often have to start at a teaching level to establish the vocabulary with fellow professionals. They can’t understand what we do if they can’t come some way towards understanding the definitions of the words that populate our language.

Katerina Dionysopoulou is co-founder and director of Bureau de Change, a London-based practice which she founded with Billy Mavropoulos. The practice works across a range of typologies and scales from product and furniture design to major refurbishment and new-builds, combining pragmatism and formality with playfulness, innovation and beauty in every project. Katerina graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture and trained at Foster+Partners before joining Heatherwick Studio where she led projects such as the UK pavilion in Shanghai and the Olympic Cauldron, prior to setting up her own practice. Recent projects include the Interlock, a mixed-use development in central London with an intricate brick façade. She combines teaching with practice, running an undergraduate unit at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

Lee is a Partner and Design Chair at Sheppard Robson. His diverse portfolio includes award-winning schools and higher education buildings, the retrofit of Old Marylebone Town Hall, and prominent workplace-led developments. His views on new models for education, modern methods of construction, and the pursuit of net zero carbon schools have been widely presented and published. Lee teaches at Liverpool University and is an External Examiner at the Architectural Association.

Lizzy is an Architect and certified Passive House Designer with 18 years’ experience of design and getting projects delivered on site.

The combination of practical experience as an architect and a deep knowledge of sustainability enables her to build the practice’s expertise, as well as sharing its work more widely. She has excellent communication skills which are put to use talking to residents of homes we’re retrofitting, teaching and enabling staff internally and participating in sustainability groups outside the office.

Recent work creating estate-wide decarbonisation route maps has seen her apply her practical retrofit understanding to a wide range of building types, as well as working with large amounts of data to provide clients with meaningful routes to get their buildings off fossil fuels.

Mark is a Carbon Sufficiency Advisor, Retrofit Coordinator, Architect, Developer, Passivhaus Designer, University Tutor and ACAN Trustee.

His practice, less.eco, helps clients lower their building related carbon emissions by-means-of initial site assessments, functional utilisation analysis, unbiased demolition appraisals, material circular reuse evaluations, consultant selection and lowest whole life carbon retrofit advice. less.eco’s mission is to minimise demolition and maximise reuse.

He has over twenty years experience leading the design and delivery of award-winning buildings, for public and private sector, often in heritage contexts, spanning housing-led masterplans, schools, hospitals, universities and life sciences, which continues to underpin his work.

Neil Taylor is founder and director of TAP, an Edinburgh based practice recognised for its thoughtful approach to working with existing buildings. The studio’s work spans a wide range of typologies and scales including residential, community and commercial projects and is characterised by an exploration of form and materiality combined with a rigorous attention to detail.

Neil graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2001 receiving the Glasgow Institute of Architecture prize. He went on to work as a Senior Architect at WilkinsonEyre in London, before founding TAP in 2009. The practice has received multiple awards including a Civic Trust Award and RIAS Building of the Year Award and in 2017 Neil was named Emerging Architect of the Year by the RIAS in recognition of the practice’s growing body of work. Alongside practice, Neil has contributed as a visiting tutor at Newcastle University.

Rachel Hoolahan is Associate Director at Orms. We design places for learning, living, working and mixing that are deeply functional and forever generous. Based in central London, we’ve been in practice for more than 40 years, continually evolving our studio to make it fit for purpose. In 2018 we became an Employee Owned Trust (EOT) and in 2024 a BCorp.

Rachel leads the practice's sustainability consultancy, bridging research and implementation to advance regenerative design, in particular material reuse, in the built environment.

She spearheaded Orms' materials passports research, developing open-source methodologies that enable design teams to catalogue and redeploy building fabric. In collaboration with Lancaster University, she published a policy paper in 2024 that provides frameworks for wider adoption.

Sarah is an architect and co-Director of Featherstone Young, a practice with expertise in place-making and social engagement. She is also a member of VeloCity, an all-women, multidisciplinary team re-imagining the village for the 21st century, creating new homes and working environments in healthy and socially cohesive places. Her projects include the award winning Tŷ Pawb (Everybody’s House), a new model for an arts venue in Wrexham, and a campus for the newly formed Black Mountains College set in the Brecon Beacons National Park. Sarah teaches at Central St Martins, UAL and the Welsh School of Architecture and is on various local authority Design Review panels. Her teaching and practice reflect her interest in the way people shape their environments and how architecture can stimulate, rather than dictate, activity and social interaction.

Sela is an accomplished architect and conservation specialist, and the Heritage and Conservation Lead at Gort Scott Architects. Before joining Gort Scott, she was a Partner at Wright and Wright Architects. Her work is characterised by a strong commitment to preserving architectural heritage while adapting historic structures for contemporary use. She has worked on many internationally important historic buildings, making a significant contribution to the field of conservation and retrofit practice. Sela regularly acts as a heritage consultant, is an RIBA-registered Specialist Conservation Architect and a member of the Oxford Design Review Panel.

Shaun Ihejetoh, co-founder and director of West Port, has built an architectural practice based on a people-first philosophy, focusing on impactful public and private spaces, truely formed from a contextual approach. Informed by his global lived experience and a love for London where he lives, Shaun advocates for those who typically have little influence over their neighborhoods' makeup. He is dedicated to democratising architecture and expanding the professional discourse to include voices from outside the industry bubble.

Soraya studied at Canterbury College of Art, School of Architecture and graduated with a Distinction. After working for practices including Pollard Thomas Edwards and John Miller + Partners, Soraya set up practice in London with her partner Patrick Theis as a Director of Theis + Khan architects.

Theis + Khan have designed award winning community buildings such as Lumen Church in King’s Cross, Bethnal Green Health Centre and Bat and Ball station in Sevenoaks; commercial buildings such as the RIBA office headquarters in Portland Place and many private houses. The mixed-use development Bateman’s Row in Shoreditch was RIBA London Building of the Year 2010 and was shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling prize 2010.

Soraya has been a visiting tutor at Strathclyde university, an external examiner at the University of Westminster and an RIBA judge and chair for the RIBA Northern Ireland regional awards. She has also judged the RIBA President’s Awards for Research, The IBP Journalism Awards, the RIBAJ MacEwen Awards, the AJ Retrofit Awards and What House Awards.. She is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects and was awarded the Freedom of the City of London in 2017. She was a committee member of the Architecture Club, a trustee on the board of the Temple Bar Trust and was on the membership committee of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects. Soraya is currently a panel member for Design South East and is also on the Folkestone and Hythe, Canterbury and Dover design panels.

Tania Jennings is the Net Zero Carbon Manager at Lewisham Council and leads their grant-funded Housing Retrofit Programme. Tania is chair of the Association of Local Energy Officers-London, a core member of Don’t Waste Buildings policy group, and is documenting her personal retrofit journey bringing a post-war terraced home to Net Zero on YouTube.

Toby is the Principal Director at BDG architecture + design, leading the studio and specialising in development strategy and the adaptive re-use of existing buildings. Over the past six years, he has led a global program of co-location projects for WPP, the world's largest creative company. Notable examples include the transformation of a derelict telephone exchange in Madrid, a 200-meter long ceramics factory in Milan, and Rivierstaete in Amsterdam - Europe’s largest office building in the 1970s - into vibrant, adaptable, and highly desirable contemporary workspaces.

Additionally, he has overseen significant deep retrofit projects on London's Southbank, including the Sea Containers Building, Rose Court, and One Southwark Bridge (formerly the Financial Times headquarters), demonstrating expertise in building repositioning and revitalisation.

Toby has previously worked at Peter Barber Architects in London, where he cultivated a commitment to cost-effective, high-quality design, as well as with Nabito Aquitectura in Barcelona and The Oval Partnership between London and Beijing. These roles provided exposure to a diverse range of project scales and sectors, from private residential to large

masterplans, consistently emphasizing economic viability, social impact, and sustainable design.

Currently, Toby divides his time between the UK and Brazil, where he recently established a project studio in São Paulo, overseeing the delivery of the latest WPP Campus building, he is also a Part 3 Professional Examiner at UCL.

Vanessa Norwood is a curator and consultant. She has shaped public and professional discourse on architecture through a series of critically acclaimed exhibitions. Vanessa provides strategic direction to clients from the built environment sector including architects, manufacturers, makers and cultural institutions.

As Head of Exhibitions at the Architectural Association Vanessa was a pioneer of urban installations, overseeing a series of temporary pavilions in Bedford Square. She was co-curator of the exhibition Venice Takeaway for the British Pavilion at the 13th International Architecture Biennale. Vanessa was Creative Director at the Building Centre, London between 2018 and 2023. She writes on the subject of architecture with a focus on materials and is a guest juror at international awards, competitions and student juries.

Vinesh Pomal is a Senior Lecturer and Architect at Leicester School of Architecture (LSA), De Montfort University where he leads Year 2 and teaches professional practice across all three years delivering an integrated curriculum on the BA(Hons) Architecture programme. He has over 10 years of professional experience having worked at ButcherBayley Architects, TPBennett, TateHindle, Levitt Bernstein and ECD Architects. His experience is across varying typologies include school, community and housing projects across all scales and tenures.

Vinesh is an advocate of equality, diversity and inclusion. He is EDI lead at LSA and has co-founded the Asian Architects Association. He was formerly an active member of the RIBA where he was RIBA Presidential Ambassador for Young Architects, co-chair of RIBA's EDI committee and sat on RIBA Council representing the London region. He has also undertaken guest reviews at several architecture schools including Sheffield, Ulster, Reading, UAL and Loughborough; sits on the Ealing, Harrow, Sutton and Bexley Health Design Review Panels and judged the RIBA London Awards. He was a founding board member of the Young Architects and Developers Alliance.

Vinesh has published numerous articles including a building review of the Haveli Building at the Hare Krishna temple by Cottrell Vermeulen for the Architects Journal and a chapter on ‘Intergenerational Living: Care for the Common Good’ for Retropioneers: Architecture Redefined, published by RIBA Enterprises.