Void Studios has awarded its Research and Regenerative Design Award to Siah Chu Yang for the Geoffrey Manton project. The project treats regenerative principles as a discipline that runs through every stage of the design process, rather than a set of measures added once the important decisions have already been made, work that sits squarely within our wider research into materiality, ecology, and the economies of making and repair.
The project shows what that discipline looks like in practice. Siah Chu Yang treats retaining what exists, designing for what comes next, and accounting for the full life of a building not as constraints on good architecture, but as its conditions. A demountable facade panel is built around the logic of its own disassembly, and recycled brick aggregate returns to the building as planting substrate. Both choices treat the building as a material and ecological system, not simply a spatial one, and it is this quality of thinking that our award was created to recognise.
The project also gives built form to the argument that longevity, understood in material, ecological, and cultural terms, deserves to be treated as a design brief, not as a limitation on one.
We congratulate Siah Chu Yang on this achievement and look forward to supporting him throughout his master’s final year.