The awards celebrate the best research in the fields of architecture and the built environment.
The 2017 RIBA President’s Medal for Research was presented to Dr Edward Denison Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and Guang Yu Ren, Independent Researcher, UK for their project: Ultra Modernism in Manchuria.
The paper explores ‘Ultra-Modernism’, an ideological term employed to describe Japan’s encounter with modernity and its distinction from western precedents/constructed cannons, deemed historically and intellectually impartial.
‘Ultra-Modernism’ refers to the speed and intensity of the development of the north-eastern region of China formerly known as Manchuria before the Second World War, when Japan’s attempts to build an empire throughout the 1930s prompted the construction of more than one hundred towns and cities in a new state they named Manchukuo.
The medal winner was selected from winners of the 2017 RIBA Research Awards, in four categories: Cities and Community, Design and Technical, History and Theory, and the Annual Theme which this year was ‘Housing'.
