Winners of the 2020 Architecture Drawing Prize

The popularity of architectural drawing is unquestionable. The fourth edition of the Architecture Drawing Prize, curated by Make Architects, Sir John Soane's Museum and the World Architecture Festival, attracted numerous entries in the three classic categories: hand-drawn, hybrid and digital. The Lockdown Prize is a fourth category added this year, the winner of which was selected from among the winners of the other three categories.
The overall winner of the Architecture Drawing Prize is Apartment #5, a Labyrinth and Repository of Spatial Memories, by Clement Laurencio of the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, the drawing which also won in the Hybrid category. 
The home which gives his drawing its name is located in London, but Clement Laurencio recreates the atmospheres of places he recalls from a recent trip to India, digitally combining pencil drawings to create a figurative whole like a labyrinth of spatial memories. 
Dear Hashima by architect and artist Marc Brousse won in the Hand-drawn category. The drawing is part of a series in which the artist questions man’s position in the city, drawing on the ideas of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. It is drawn using a technique he calls “traillism”, a sort of trail in which line symbolises life, space, thought and memory.
The winner in the Digital category is Re-Reading Metropolis by Chenglin Able of the University of California, Berkeley. Judge Lily Jencks, co-founder of LilyJencksStudio/JencksSquared, comments: " Layering drawing types- maps, plans, infrastructural systems and data entry, Re-Reading Metropolis suggests a fresh way to map an urban territory, both playful and precise”.
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, this year the contest introduced a special Lockdown Prize, awarded to Airplane Tower by Victor Hugo Azevedo and Cheryl Lu Xu, of Robert A. M. Stern Architects: a work offering a truly innovative way of combining hand drawing with creative use of digital tools and rendering. The artists propose a truly fascinating design concept at a time when travelling is practically impossible, especially by plane. The drawing convinces us with its use of multiple perspectives, “while addressing serious questions around the pandemic, interlinking the environment and reuse agenda with the housing crisis and the many challenges faced by the travel industry", according to judge Ken Shuttleworth, founder of Make Architects. During the online awards ceremony, the two architects explained that, just like the boom in projects recycling used shipping containers in recent years, they see planes as well-insulated containers with a number of intrinsic qualities making them suitable for a creative upcycling process.
Pandemic permitting, we hope to see the winner projects on display at WAF 2021 in Lisbon, where they will be on exhibit in the Festival Hall.

Christiane Bürklein

The Architecture Drawing Prize 2020
More information: https://thedrawingprize.worldarchitecturefestival.com/
Images: see captions
1) Overall winner and Hybrid, Clement Laurencio, Apartment #5, a Labyrinth and Repository of Spatial