AJ Student Prize | Postgraduate Winner: Amy Wilkinson

London School of Architecture MArch graduate Amy Wilkinson wins the Postgraduate award at the 2025 AJ Student Prize.

Amy was selected as the “stand-out winner”, with the judges saying:

‘It is more than commendable, this project is focused and based in real life. It ticks all the boxes.

‘It questions the role of the architect today and the value of being an architect.

‘This is what the AJ Student Prize is about: taking a real problem, being engaged with what’s happening around us and trying to find a solution that can seriously help.”

Amy Wilkinson’s Part 2 thesis project at the London School of Architecture ‘School is City, City is School’ uses the RAAC crisis as a catalyst to question both the material failure and the typological redundancy of UK mainstream school buildings. Focusing on Hornsey School as a testbed, it explores how the urgent need for decant can be transformed into a design tool, distributing educational activity into the fabric of the city. The project reflects on the pedagogical benefits revealed through decant, such as real world learning, flexibility, and collaboration, and embeds these into a new school typology. Through a dual programme, the school extends into the city, while the city is invited into the school, creating a porous, civic, and future facing model for education.

“School is City, City is School is a profoundly intelligent and timely project that reimagines the role of education within the urban fabric. In response to the RAAC crisis affecting schools in London, Amy’s proposal transforms this pressing challenge into an opportunity to radically rethink what a school can be, not as a closed institution, but as a civic and porous network embedded in the life of the city.

The work is tectonically rich and conceptually clear, blending policy awareness, material sensitivity, and spatial innovation. Amy’s strategic use of time as both analytical and generative device allows for a phased, resilient approach to urban transformation. Her treatment of learning spaces as shared public infrastructure, including courtyards, gardens, and roofscapes, creates catalytic conditions for new forms of engagement, deeply responsive to context, climate, and community.

Grounded in rigorous research, the thesis is articulated across every scale, from urban systems to spatial detail. The visual language, evocative, precise, and reflective, elevates the work and demonstrates a highly mature design process.

This is a socially attuned, radical and beautifully resolved proposal that speaks powerfully to the future of architecture, education, and the city” – Esther Escribano, Amy’s Design Tutor at the LSA / Senior Architect StudioWeave /Associate Lecturer UAL: Central Saint Martins