The 2014 RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship has launched and is inviting applications from schools of architecture around the world. A £6,000 grant will be awarded to one student by a panel of judges which includes Lord Foster and the President of the RIBA.
Lord Foster said:
"As a student I won a prize that allowed me to spend a summer travelling through Europe and to study first hand buildings and cities that I knew only from the pages of books. It was a revelation – liberating and exhilarating in so many ways. Today it is my privilege to fund the RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship, which I hope will have a lasting legacy – offering the chance for discovery and the inspiration for exciting new work – for generations to come."
RIBA President Stephen Hodder said:
"Lord Foster is providing an amazing opportunity for a student to travel and develop their research. Good luck to everyone applying for this chance of a lifetime scholarship. I’m looking forward to reviewing the submissions."
The deadline for submissions is Friday 25 April 2014. Further details and an application form can be downloaded from the RIBA website architecture.com.
Notes for editors:
First established in 2006, the scholarship is now in its seventh year and is intended to fund international research on a topic related to the survival of our towns and cities, in a location of the student’s choice. Past RIBA Norman Foster Scholars have travelled through the Americas, Europe, Africa, South East Asia, the Middle and the Far East, and Russia.
Proposals for research might include: learning from the past to inform the future; the future of society; the density of settlements; sustainability; the use of resources; the quality of urban life; and transport.
Past recipients of the RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship:
2013: ‘Charles Booth Going Abroad’ by Sigita Burbulyte of Bath School of Architecture, which takes the poverty maps of Victorian social reformer Charles Booth as the starting point for an exploration of slum communities across four continents
2012: ‘Material Economies: recycling practices in informal settlements along African longitude 30ºE’ by Thomas Aquilina, Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, part of the University of Edinburgh, UK
2011: ‘Sanitation’ by Sahil Deshpande, Rizvi College of Architecture, Mumbai, India
2010: ‘In Search of Cold Spaces – a study of northern public space’ by Andrew Mackintosh, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK
2009: ‘Ancestral Cities, Ancestral Sustainability’ by Amanda Rivera, University de Bio Bio, Chile
2008: ‘The Role of Public Transport in Shaping Sustainable Humane Habitats: Case Studies Across Three Continents’by Faizan Jawed Siddiqi, Rizvi College of Architecture, Mumbai, India
2007: ‘Emerging East: Exploring and Experiencing the Asian Communist City’by Ben Masterton-Smith, UCL, London, UK
