AJ 2022 Student Prize Postgraduate Nominee
MArch / RIBA Part II - The University of Greenwich

Quote from The Architect's Journal:

"Every RIBA and ARB-accredited school in the UK was invited to nominate students for the fifth annual AJ Student Prize, which celebrates the best work across three categories: undergraduate, postgraduate and sustainability."

The Hans Christian Andersen House

The project is situated inside the childhood home of Hans Christian Andersen, a mystical early nineteenth-century space where the storyteller’s dreams were crafted into fairy tales. The house is the site for this speculative, miniature project, set during his childhood from 1805 to 1817: a home, a workspace, and a chamber for imagination.
 
Andersen’s childhood was troubled; abandoned by his parents at an early age, later adopted by an impoverished shoemaker. The project portrays the relationship between the two protagonists, speculating on how the young child’s imagination developed in such troubled circumstances.
 
The stepfather constructs the architectural fragments of the project, utilising found materials and offcuts from the craft of shoemaking to bring the lonely and isolated stepson joy during his otherwise difficult childhood. There are thirteen in total, one for each of the years Andersen occupied the home.
 
The house has been de-constructed into fundamental elements: the walls, floors, furniture and bookshelf, are each reinterpreted as ‘sites’ for micro-scale architectural interventions. The soul and enchantment of the house moves through Andersen’s fictional worlds; the spaces in which they were written become key narrative drivers, extracting themes from the fairy tales.