Dualchas Building Design

An expert panel of acclaimed architects were assembled for the judging panel including Phil Griffen at Spoken Image, Charlie Hussey of Sutherland Hussey Architects and Hannah Lawson of John McAslan & Partners, all overseen by the chairmanship of Neil Gillespie of Reiach and Hall.

Phil explained the judges rationale: “ I've always been intrigued to see small houses on the Isle of Skye, it excites me to see this fine architecture in a north British context, it makes me think of northern Europe or Scandinavia. The fact that you’re living in the middle of a city as I do you lose sight of the fact that there are lots of beautiful examples of vernacular architecture. I really, really like that. That really appeals to me.”

“I think a lot of the larger commercial schemes this year have been disappointing, there has been nothing as exceptional on the large scale, for instance last year the Grand Prix winner was the Denton Corker Marshall scheme at the Civil Justice Centre in Manchester and that was clearly an exceptional building. I like a lot of the smaller schemes in other categories this year; it has been the smaller schemes which have grabbed my eye.”

Charlie added: “The idea that someone is working quietly away doing really nice, modest, low budget stuff… I think that sends quite a good message about these little remote buildings in a landscape, it doesn’t really matter whether it's this one or that one.

Neil commented: “There is modesty in a lot of the proposals, maybe that is more of a modern attitude. Inevitably smaller projects are easier to convey in awards, they're easier to take on board and understand. Larger projects are much more difficult to comprehend. This is a private conversation between spaces, you can hardly get more poetic.”

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