Architect

Isaac Cobo Displas is a Spanish architect and academic, born in 1975 in Catalonia. The son of a well-known contractor, Juan Cobo Cobos, he spent much of his childhood on building sites.

After his father’s passing, he began a bachelor’s in Industrial Design Engineering at the Elisava Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona in 1996 in preparation to become a product designer.

In 2000, he was a finalist for the ADI-Fad awards.

He began his architecture studies in 2003 at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. In 2005, he moved to the University of East London on the advice of Peter Salter and finished his Master´s under Mark Hayduk, who was also strongly influenced by Peter Salter.

He has taught at the University of East London since 2009 and has
been a Senior Lecturer in Architectural Design to date. He worked as an architectural technician for a number of years at Murray John Architects in London before becoming the creative director at Manhattan Loft Corporation (MLC), restoring St Pancras.

In 2008, he co-founded CocoArchitects with Daniel Coll, an awarded firm where he
still currently practices.

Architect

Peter Salter (born 1947) is a British architectural designer and academic. In 1962 he began a course at the Shoreditch College of Furnishing Trades, in preparation to become a furniture designer. In 1964, he worked as a junior draftsman for a patent glazing manufacturer.

In 1966 he started his studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

He studied and taught at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, where he received his Diploma in 1980, was Head of the School of Architecture at the University of East London and since 2006 has been Professor of Architectural Design at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University.

Salter worked as an architectural technician for a number of local authorities in London. He is currently practicing as Salter+Collingridge.

Architect

Mark Hayduk (d. 2012) studied at the AA under Peter Salter graduating in 1991.

Mark was a much-loved tutor at the University of East London’s School of Architec¬ture, where he co-ordinated the degree course and led the celebrated Diploma Unit 3.

Peter Salter remarks: “Mark’s student work developed a poetic from a technical reading of site conditions and he was fantastic at communicating that sensibility
to his own students.

Juror

Jordi Truco is a graduate architect from Escola Tecnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona, ETSAB. In 2003, received the March Distinction in “Emergent Technologies and Design” at The Architectural Association of London, AA. UK. He is also the recipient of the first prize of the Royal Academy of the Arts of London in Architecture, student category, 2003.

In 2003, he founded HYBRID, with Sylvia Felipe. An Architecture design studio involved in the development of an integrated design strategy that intersects computation, parametric design, biomimetic engineering and digital fabrication, in order to create and design objects, spaces or architectural systems that respond and adapt to their environment.

Juror

Xavier Font, MEng Civil Engineering and CEng MICE, founder and owner of Alfa Polaris, is a thirty-year experienced engineer, skilled in regional planning, site development and structural and bridge design. For the last twenty-five years, he has been involved in the design and construction process of more than thirty bridges, half of which have been built under his supervision.

His designs are characterised by a search for a balance between functional, social, cultural, technological, and economic conditions in which a project is set. But, overall, his main goal when he designs is to create locus, to make apparent the Genius Loci —the spirit— of the place.
He does share Andreu Ulied’s opinion that there can be nothing more uncultured, less civilised, than a landscape with no places.

Since the foundation of ALFA POLARIS, he has taken an artisan course of action characterized by the love of craft and detail, and the hands-on
approach to his work. He sees craft work as a way to keep himself rooted in material reality; he feels himself an artisan of the built environment.

Juror

Arthur Mamou-Mani AA Dipl, ARB/RIBA FRSA is a French architect and the director of the award-winning Mamou-Mani Architects (MMA), specialising in a new type of digitally designed and fabricated architecture.

He is a lecturer at the University of Westminster and a tutor at
UCL Bartlett in London. Arthur is the founder of Fab. Pub, MMA’s sister company, a digital fabrication laboratory that allows people to experiment with large-scale 3D printers and laser cutters, and the co-founder of GAAMMA, a joint venture with Goudchaux Architectes.

Since 2016, he has been a member of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).
Arthur won the Gold Prize at the American Architecture Prize for the Wooden Wave project installed at Buro Happold Engineering. He has delivered numerous talks, including a TedX talk in the United States, and has been featured in publications such as the New York Times and Forbes.

Mamou-Mani’s clients include ARUP, Buro Happold Engineering, Karen Millen Fashion, The Burning Man Festival, FoodInk, and Imagination Ltd.
Before founding Mamou-Mani Architects in 2011, Arthur worked with Atelier Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid Architects, and Proctor and Matthews Architects.

Juror

Co-director MUPD (formerly MaCT)
Eduardo Rico-Carranza is a Civil Engineer focused on the application of creative forms of visualisation of data analytics in urban and landscape design. His current research focuses on the development of interfaces that capture design in the form of sketches as a form of survey for large scale input in participatory processes. He is carrying out an EPSRC funded Ph.D. in the Space Syntax department in Bartlett school of architecture and acting as a design consultant for Space Syntax Limited.

Eduardo currently co-directs the Landscape Urbanism master’s program at the Architectural Association, exploring the role of design within large-scale landscape and environmental policy. He has extensive teaching experience in other institutions such as GSD, Bartlett and Berlage Institute. Eduardo has experience working in the Urban Infrastructure Team at Arup as well as an urban and landscape designer in a variety of award-winning projects with smaller firms in London.

He is Co-director of the Master’s in Advanced Urban Planning & Data Analytics (formerly City & Technology).

Juror

Jan collaborated for several years with Witherford Watson Mann architects in London, where he worked as the project architect on the Sterling Prize winning Astley Castle.

Jan has been teaching for eleven years at the East London University and ETSAC Architecture University in La Coruna, Spain.

At that time he also realised a number of public projects. Most notably the transformation of a historic cinema building to a contemporary performing arts space in Galicia, Spain.

Jan is a Berlin based architectural and design practice with two decades of international experience in Germany, England, Switzerland, Italy and Spain. Jan Liebe and Fabian Wichers met at the Accademia di Archittettura in Mendrisio, Switzerland, where they were both taught by Peter Zumthor and strongly influenced by his approach to space, construction and place.