An interview with Amani Radeef: winner of Max Fordham Environmental Design Prize


Amani Radeef is the winner of this year’s Max Fordham Environmental Design Prize. Her project re-imagines a traditional Viking long-house as a contemporary town hall performance space.


The project entitled ‘An Architecture of Darkness,’ is part of Radeef’s fifth year Masters of Architecture project for UCL Bartlett. It explores the abilities of light and darkness to manipulate space in a hypothetical Icelandic community building.

Radeef's project featured a model of the town hall and a photographic and illustrative exhibition to demonstrate her vision. It formed part of the UCL Bartlett Student Summer Show and recently completed the prestigious London Institution.

We caught up with the talented architect to discuss her work and how she is feeling about winning this venerable prize:

Where did you get the inspiration for your design?

The study originates from a keen interest and opportunity to work with light as a medium, both natural and artificial, posing a stimulating architectural investigation into materials, thresholds, and an architectural language that deals with the capturing, containing and exposing of light.

 The objective to investigate a potential for a new architecture that presents the reality of space based on the abstraction and disfigurement of sight is the basis of this piece of research and proposal. As vision and degrees of sight play a major role in this thesis, the ways in which architecture and space can manifest to obstruct and abstract natural light serves as an important parameter for evoking this sense of mystery. 

The inspiration for the scheme stemmed from early threshold projection studies, which looked at light as the material ‘to be made’. 

 Why did you choose Iceland as the hypothetical location of your design?

After having been on a unit field trip in November, to Iceland, I developed a keen interest into the exploration of the edge of the remote. After venturing deep into the remote Icelandic wilderness, Lake Myvatn, situated in the north of Iceland and the fourth largest lake in Iceland, quickly became exploration grounds for my proposal. Consideration into how one might activate remote territories rich with aggressive natural phenomena, thermal heat, and a stretching of time from midnight sun to full days of darkness was the focus of the research and I very quickly became curious in the testing of inventions within this very particular and unique setting.

What challenges did you face when you were coming up with the design?

The Arctic has been long conceived of as an unknown, inaccessible, forbidden and static landscape. As remote, distinctive and diverse place Iceland is, it has also been very much defined by various perceptions of darkness. Located in the sub-polar region, Iceland is characterised by its long summer days and very short winter days. It is dictated by availability of light, thus having a profound impact on the way in which Icelandic people live and have built historically. Conventionally, notions of darkness hold negative connotations, with an ability to obscure and hide the visually tangible field of light, yet, as the land of ‘light and darkness’, the people of Iceland embrace this challenging circumstance, adjusting their modes of life to suit. Subsequently, the main challenge was to express an architecture about light, in which part enclosure comprising of filtering devices from the earlier light studies informed the design, and embraced and merged with the landscape and harmonised with its temporal condition.

How did you include Icelandic traditions into your work?

 The programme re-imagines the traditional Viking longhouse, originally located at the archaeological excavated site the proposal occupies - also a place of multi-functional meeting, festivities and occupation. The investigation into different meeting spaces - traditional and new - presents a Town hall and performance space, with archives and social areas. The mysterious site comes alive at night, through unconventional meetings around fire pits, really engaging with the history of the site, Icelandic traditions in community meeting and most importantly the ephemeral yet strange qualities of the surrounding landscape and light activity. 

How did you incorporate the unusual Icelandic light and landscape into your work?

 My personal interests lie in working closely with materiality and texture, alongside technical resolution to the architectural intervention. The work is divided into earlier projection explorations, site and programme responsive development, resulting in a combined exploratory 1:50 test bed, analytical model which the architecture is explored through.

 My key aims of the design project lies closely with the thesis intentions which question how one can fabricate a spatial construct that pursues the revelation of the physical and psychological parallels between sight and spatial perception. Creative exploration through a series of physical tests uncovered how the degradation of sight exposes the realities of built space, transforming this ‘heterotopia’ and thus providing an appreciation for spatial realities. To assess cause and effect from the light studies against what was desired for particular programmatic functions, various spatial constructs were formed. Iterative cell testing provided a clear understanding of this cause and effect, whilst scenario testing with best and worst case (high and low sun angles) ensured a feasible resolution to the design proposal. The progression of the quality and control of the testing methods is also documented, ranging from light bulb studies to more advanced sky-dome simulations for more accuracy of intensity and precision in sun angles. 

An Architecture of Darkness engages with darkness and obscurity, vastness and depth, and abstraction and illusion, in which the testing provided possible solutions for. 

How would the building function as a town hall and performance space?

Icelandic meeting is traditionally held at a monumental or ancient site. Lake Myvatn has increasingly become a very historic place, rich in culture and mythology and a number of historic sites surround the site, making it an ideal spot for centralizing meetings. It was a place historically welcoming Icelandic people from all over, becoming the centre of Icelandic culture - thus, centralizing the meeting to the centre of the lake makes it viable.

An in-between environment of building and landscape which mediates between both was proposed. The architecture has an adaptable quality, allowing the building to open to the landscape, for programmatic spaces to spill out in the immediate environment. The strategic positioning of the main meeting space, central to the lake, almost equidistant from neighbouring towns provides key processional route that renews dialogue between the site and the processional activity happening within this spatial field of the lake. Sequentially, it creates a new cornerstone for processional life within Myvatn Lake town. Involvement of light, adds to the ritualistic events, creating new spatial relationships within an urban setting. The premise of using firelight within the landscape couples up as outdoor meeting spaces, and a light source, which lights the site and building up in a unique way, making it noticeable from all around the lake.

 Whilst architecture continuously strives for successfully light mediated environments, this proposal uncovers how darkness contributes to spatial impressions within a programme of performance and meeting. 

How do you feel about winning Max Fordham Environmental Design Prize?

I am delighted to have been chosen for this year’s Max Fordham Environmental Design Prize. It has been the 5th year they have awarded this prize to a student from The Bartlett School of Architecture, and from what I have heard and seen, the majority of the previous winners have gone on to develop their area of research in a very unique way, which I hope to do also, with their help! It is really nice to be able to carry on with the masters work, even after university, and with their help and expertise, I hope to extend my own knowledge and continue having fun, learning and experimenting with lighting and its environmental impacts. 








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