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For the past 9 years West Fraser has partnered with RIBA Journal to hold an annual competition that challenges architects to use the industry’s most popular OSB brand, SterlingOSB Zero. With a different brief each year, the RIBA Journal competition has been hotly contested by some of the industry’s most creative architecture practices, all vying to win the top prize of £2,500.
Winners Julian Evans & Sian Briggs speak about Alcove Architectures entry to the 2024 RIBAJ SterlingOSB Zero architectural design competition with West Fraser. Their entry Sports Climing at Grant’s Quay reimagined how the sport of climbing might be improved as a spectator experience.
The 2024 competition drew inspiration from the Paris 2024 Olympics and the fact that Edinburgh and London at the time had been put forward as potential locations for the 2026 Commonwealth Games. Entrants were asked to create a temporary sports venue that melds in with the surrounding city. The winning design ‘Sport Climbing at Grant Quay Wharf’ by Julian Evans & Sian Briggs from Alcove Architecture had spectators watch the action from tall banks of terraces that rise across from the climbing walls, offering intensity and proximity to the action. The structure is formed of West Fraser’s SterlingOSB Zero, normally employed as a cladding material but here interlocked to form the stadium and set its parameters.
The 2023 competition saw entrants redevelop a department store into a mid-sized secondary school, using SterlingOSB Zero as a key component. The theme brought together two challenges facing today’s society: A need for more secondary schools and the demise of the department store. The winner, ‘Edwin Jones Academy’ by Paul Cashin Architects & Keith Evans Architects succeeded in achieving all of this by connecting the new school intelligently with the surrounding pedestrian retail streets, parks and a historic route in Southampton. It also restored a historic building and introduced vernacular details which reference Southampton’s docks – a level of detail and consideration that stood out.
2022’s winning entry, ‘The Keep’ by David Russell Young and Henry Claymore Young imagines a post-apocalyptic future, where nine townsfolk retreat to Scotland’s west coast. There, within the walls of a historic keep, they encounter a series of modular SterlingOSB Zero structures dating from the historic year 2022, nestled amongst the corbelled turrets. The nine SterlingOSB Zero insertions require minimal modifications to the
ruins. They are prefabricated from OSB SIPs and clad in larch. Inside they contain a workspace (where stories are composed in solitude), basic toilet provisions and a sleeping platform accessed by ladder. The spaces are consciously introverted.
The 2021 winner was Kevin Sulca’s Ventanilla House – a modular solution to the unique challenges of living in Lima, Peru. Sulca’s design was praised for its compactness, scalability and polemical stance against the poor living conditions of Ventanilla’s inhabitants, given the district’s humidity, precarious housing and lack of green space. Its provision of housing to people across the social spectrum was commendable. “Different levels of society could live in these houses”, applauded judge Kristofer Adelaide, architectural director of KA-A.
Reimagining existing structures, breathing new life into them by adding or removing layers of their fabric, was the theme of the 2020 RIBA Journal / Norbord Europe competition. Entrants were tasked with peeling back and substituting dilapidated building elements, layer by layer, with SterlingOSB Zero. Paper Architecture and Bethan Watson’s designs for Hilder’s Yard, a disused site of a former garage in Sevenoaks, Kent, transformed it into a mixed-use retail scheme for small local businesses and social enterprises in a supportive commercial model. The integration between the original Victorian structures and a prefabricated SterlingOSB Zero insertion won
over with the judges.
In 2019 the competition was all about making the most of the urban roof, an exciting space that is often overlooked. Architects were challenged to design a rooftop space of up to three storeys on an existing urban building of their choice. The winner was Reed Watts Architects’ Rooftop Refuge, a dual use roof extension that operated as a bar in the summer to fund its use as a homeless shelter in the winter. Judges appreciated both the experimental concept and the clarity of the submission.
Entrants were invited to create a proposal for a portable, transformable workspace made from SterlingOSB in a room within a house, public building, school or office. The winners, Tom Gregory and Fraser Wallis, created The Playwright’s Retreat, an isolated SterlingOSB workspace eyrie set up from the ground, which unfurled back to earth to act as a performative space for the playwright’s work.
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