Congratulations to Rhiain Bower, our MArch student who won the RIBA President’s Dissertation Medal 2017 for her thesis ‘Baricsio: The Slate Quarrymen’s Barracks in North West Wales’.
Tutored by Professor Harry Charrington, Rhiain used a combination of fieldwork, archival data, newspaper clippings, poetry and local accounts, to write a compelling study of the 19th-century barrack dwellings constructed for workers at a slate quarry in Wales. You can see parts of Rhiain’s dissertation here.
‘The remote architecture was not particularly well-documented at the time, so Bower combined her own visual documentation with accounts gleaned from the time to draw a portrait of the harsh conditions experienced by the quarrymen who lived in the stark barracks from week to week for the opportunity of a salary.’
This is the fourth year in a row that a student from the Department of Architecture of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment has won an award in the RIBA President’s Medals. An outstanding achievement!
