Totally Modular’s House iO Competition Proves A Great Success

Totally Modular launched their ‘House iO’ competition last week, in collaboration with MOBIE, Value Shift, Infill Works, Bristol Housing Festival (BHF) and Department of Architecture and the Built Environment, University of West England (UWE) Bristol.

The competition asked architectural students from UWE to form teams, to design a prefabricated housing scheme. Using Totally Modular’s system, solutions using sites allocated for housing in Bristol will aim to address particular conditions of homelessness in the city.

The weeklong competition ran from Monday 8th February and finished Friday midday 12th February. The competition was sponsored by Totally Modular (a volumetric housing manufacturer), who provided £500 of prize money and a chance to visit the Totally Modular factory in the West Midlands.

The competition was greatly received at the university with multiple teams of architectural students taking part. The judging panel all commented on the high level of competition submissions and the judging process was very difficult due to the high level of design capabilities shown. The judges consisted of; Ele George (Innovation Lead at Totally Modular), Mark Southgate (Chief Executive at MoBIE), Zoe Metcalfe (Director at Value Shift), Jessie Wilde (Deputy Project Director at BHF) and Oliver Sanger (Founder at Infill Works). The judging criteria consisted of; Response to client needs/brief (30%), Design (30%), Place making (20%), Site and constraints (10%), Innovation (10%).

The final result concluded that:

First Place – Team Y– Isuri Ratnayake, Mahek Khushalani, Seanne Christhian, Zoe Restrick.

Runners Up – Team S - Alice Adams, Sian Wood, Shermin McClernon, Jessica Wood

Highly Commended – Team P - James Monteith, Daniel Gonzales Penalas, Kiana Eskandani, Luca Carlisle, Roberts Tuzilkins, Nikola Asojana.

Highly Commended – Team R3 - Emily Harvey, Bradley Homer, Louis Parry-Jones, Jake Fellows-Samuel.

Team Y, submitted the winning entry with the judges concluding… ‘A very clear and well-organised project that inter-relates communal spaces and clusters of housing that create thresholds of shared space and privacy.’

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Head judge of the House iO competition, Mark Southgate, Chief Executive of MoBIE commented…

"As judges we loved judging this Totally Modular design competition.  It was VERY hard for us to choose a winner and runner up - the fact that we also highly commended two entries shows you just how good the standard of the designs were. We were genuinely wowed by the standard of the work that the teams produced and kept having to remind ourselves that the teams were not professionals and that they only had 4.5 days to create these designs from scratch - the results were amazing!  We were also highly impressed by the way the teams really addressed all parts of a challenging brief.  The future of housing design is in great hands - we can't wait to see what you all do next".

Milly Harvey, architectural student from UWE, whose project was ‘Highly Commended’ said…

"I would just like to thank you for the opportunity, it feels great to be recognised as architects, not just students. I think we have all come away from this project feeling inspired and encouraged so thank you for that". 

James Burch, Associate Head of Department of Architecture and the Built Environment at UWE, was greatly impressed with the competition, noting…

“The House iO Competition's elision of issues of homelessness, volumetric housing technologies and sites in Bristol made for a problem that felt relevant to our students and the challenge attracted entries from all five of our undergraduate architectural courses - from first years to final year students.  The students enjoyed tackling a real-life brief and acting as design teams working under pressure to deliver their proposals.  In less than a week the teams created a range of sensitive, well-researched and well-argued proposals that they, and we, are proud of and with this work UWE's Department of Architecture & The Built Environment is pleased to be raising the level of debate of contemporary housing design in the City.”

The next steps now see winning team ‘Team Y’, receive a large proportion of the prize money (from Totally Modular), a tour of the Totally Modular manufacturing facility and their winning designs being considered for real life implementation on a Bristol site.

All Partners include:

Totally Modular – @totallymodular on twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook & Youtube.

MoBie - www.mobie.org.uk; @mobiehome (twitter); @mobiehomefutures (insta); MOBIE (LinkedIn) 

Bristol Housing Festival - www.bristolhousingfestival.org.uk; twitter: @bristol_hf; @bristolhousingfestival on Insta and Facebook and Youtube. 

Value Shift

Infill Works

University of West England