Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) President's Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis

Torsten Schröder has won the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) President's Award for Outstanding PhD Research. His thesis ‘Translating the concept of sustainability into architectural design practices: London’s City Hall as an exemplar” explored what architects, engineers, clients and others do with the concept of sustainability in the daily context of their design studios, offices and on site. To get a better understanding of how the concept of sustainability became continuously transformed within contingent, complex and dynamic architectural design practices as buildings materialise Schröder developed the analytical framework of ‘translation’. This framework is transferable to other architectural design practices and is geared towards creating new theoretical and practical opportunities to advance comprehensive, innovative, compelling and credible enactments of sustainability in architecture. Schröder's thesis was undertaken in the ‘Cities Programme’ an interdisciplinary research center based at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and was supervised by Professor Mike Savage and Professor Ricky Burdett.