Congratulations Jordan: RIBA Presidents Medal Commendation 2020.

Congratulations to M’Arch student Jordan Whitewood-Neal was nominated for two RIBA awards – both the RIBA President’s Silver Medal and the Dissertation Medal and has just received a Commendation for his Dissertation.

The images shown here are are from Jordan’s Design Thesis submission and from his Dissertation. Here Jordan tells us more.

“I was incredibly proud to be first nominated and then to receive a Commendation for the RIBA Silver and RIBA Presidents Dissertation Medal this year.  The Presidents Medals are an opportunity to be presented next to some of the best projects of 2020, so to be part of that is amazing. The thesis and dissertation were a turning point in my work and have inspired my current research on the Architectural Research MRes here at the University of Brighton”

Cascade Experiment’ is an autoethnographic research based project which, deriving from a personal experience in a wheelchair, explores the relationships between non-normative embodiment, technology and perception within the landscape – concluding with the proposal of a new accessible woodland within the Ashdown Forest. The design project runs in parallel to my dissertation which used an Autoethnographic methodology to analyse the ontological entanglement between the body (self) and tool (wheelchair) in forming new epistemological understandings of landscape.

Through writing and digital reconstruction – the project culminates in a speculative film in which a semi-autonomous silvicultural infrastructure facilitates the expansion of an isolated woodland environment. Using varying scales of space and time, the film oscillates between the first person perspective of ground conditions navigated via the wheelchair, to the wide scale speculation of the woodland intervention.

Inspired by Tim Ingold’s concept of the Taskscape the woodland infrastructure is animated by a series of devices which grow, curate, conserve, observe and expand the original forest Clump in which the study took place, allowing a mediation between the two organic states of the body and landscape – in order to understand the consequences of non-normative embodiment on spatial perception.