Dido Milne chairs the 2023 RIBA House of the Year Award

CSK Director, Dido Milne was excited to be asked to chair the 2023 RIBA House of the Year.  Along with her fellow judges,  Bev Dockray of Coppin Dockray Architects,  Jessam Al-Jawad of  Al-Jawad Pike and Albert Hill from Modern House they had a full day at the RIBA wrestling with the task of whittling the entries down to arrive at a longlist we all agreed upon.  There were a couple of projects which divided opinion and it is always enjoyable to really debate the merits of these projects as it helps really to clarify the judging criteria and our role as architects.

Dido’s comments on this year’s long list were:

"This year’s RIBA House of the Year longlist includes a selection of exciting new typologies – from modest terraced houses to larger family homes. It showcases architects expressing their creativity within a wide variety of settings - from homes on tight urban sites where the ingenuity is evident in the twists and turns of the plan and section, to detached rural homes where the architect has been given free rein to reimagine the baronial hall or lakeside retreat. And in village settings, it is gratifying to see a number of the projects working with the local vernacular, forging a new contextual style whilst also retaining an authentic sense of culture. Localism in terms of material sourcing was a theme which ran throughout, and there were exemplary retrofit projects to applaud and extensions that excelled in their own right whilst bringing huge benefit to the host building. 

At this critical point in time in terms of ‘climate break down’ we were really looking to see how deep a dive the architects had taken into issues around environmental sustainability. It was encouraging to see in both the prototype for modular social housing and some of the larger houses on the longlist how there was a much more holistic approach to what might constitute a truly sustainable house. What we are building with, the provenance of materials and the impact on biodiversity are starting to really influence designs."