An Aberdeen academic has won a prestigious award for a proposed re-design of the heart of the city.
Amar Bennadji, who is an architecture lecturer at the Robert Gordon University, was given the Academy Encouragement Award for educational merit at the Forum 8 design festival in Tokyo.
Mr Bennadji’s vision included pedestrianising a section of Union Street from around the Trinity Centre to Market Street, and introducing trams.
His project also explored the best methods for teaching urban planning to distance learning students through online resources.
He said: “The project worked out really well, allowing me to not only investigate solutions for re-imagining Aberdeen’s Union Street but also to test the teaching of urban planning via distance learning.
“It came about by chance, as my researcher for the Union Street project, Fajar Rezandi, unexpectedly had to go to Asia for the summer so I started to develop a double strategy for exploring distance learning methods while communicating with him online using the cloud environment.
“There is a big debate and a lot of opposition around teaching architecture and planning via distance learning, and although I had a positive experience, face-to-face debate and the opportunity to scribe magical lines on paper should not become a thing of the past.”
It is the second prize for the university at the festival, as student team James Nicol, 23, Sabin Maguregui, 23, and Fajar Rezandi, 24, picked up the special Judges’ Award for their vision of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Village in the Virtual Design World Cup category.
