This year’s Norman Foster Foundation Scholarship has been awarded to Joode Umweni, who impressed the jury with three projects: the topography project, the ‘water’ project and “my environment” project. All of them were focused on her thinking and the ways she gains inspiration for architectural design.

The first project consisted of portrait drawings of her friends, incorporating a continuous ink line-drawing for the hair, and these lines were reminiscent of the mountainous landscapes that she climbed on an expedition she took on Snowdonia. In the second project she compared the fluidity of water, which she then connected to the fluidity of her identity through a multi-media A1 portrait of her great grandmother. Her third and final project drew attention to the impact of the passage of time on architectural perception on her street in South London.

The Norman Foster Foundation funds the full academic fees of one student per year, to ensure that the most promising candidates in Europe, regardless of means, have the opportunity to undertake The Bartlett School’s BSc Architecture Course