Judges
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
Assistant professor of architectural and urban design, EPFL
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and assistant professor at EPFL, where she leads the RIOT design and research laboratory.
As an assistant professor of urban design at Harvard University from 2020, Malterre-Barthes started A Global Moratorium on New Construction, an initiative that interrogates current development protocols and provocatively argues for the suspension of all new building activity.
Malterre-Barthes’ interests relate to urgent aspects of contemporary urbanisation, material extraction, climate emergency and social justice. She holds a PhD from ETH Zurich on the political economy of food systems and its influence on architecture and urban design, and is a founding member of two activist networks dedicated to equality in architecture.
William Mann
director, Witherford Watson Mann Architects
William Mann is a director of Witherford Watson Mann Architects, an award-winning practice noted for their work with existing buildings.
Based in London, WWM’s work focuses on the physical continuity of buildings through the social evolution of cities and institutions. Their projects of transformation include the Stirling Prize-winning Astley Castle, a house built from within the ruins of a twelfth-century castle; a new theatre for Nevill Holt Opera within a seventeenth-century stable block; and the transformation of the Courtauld Institute of Art at Somerset House.
WWM is a thinking practice, collaborating with artists, writers and sociologists as well as engineers and contractors. Mann himself has contributed chapters to a number of architectural journals and books, and written for Casabella, Drawing Matter and Archis, on the sometimes awkward relations of buildings to cities and old to new. His writing in The Architectural Review includes a Retrospective on Belgian architects Robbrecht en Daem and a reflective essay on drawing in the design process: ‘sketching lets you think with the handbrake off,’ he writes.