Applications Open for 2020 Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship

John Hill

17. March 2020

Photo via RIBA

The deadline for the £7,000 RIBA Norman Foster Scholarship — open to architecture students enrolled at eligible universities — is April 24, 2020.

The scholarship was created in 2007 and has been given annually to "a student of architecture who demonstrates the potential for outstanding achievement and original thinking on issues that relate to the sustainable survival of cities and towns," per the scholarship page on RIBA's website.

The scholarship is supported by the Madrid-based Norman Foster Foundation. Its president, Lord Foster himself, attests to the importance of travel in architectural education:

"As a student, I won a prize that allowed me to spend a summer traveling through Europe and to study first-hand buildings and cities that I knew only from the pages of books. It was a revelation – liberating and exhilarating in so many ways."

Looking forward, Foster hopes the scholarship "will have a lasting legacy – offering the chance for discovery and the inspiration for exciting new work – for generations to come."

Per the RIBA website, students interested in applying "must be enrolled in, and have successfully completed the first year of, a professional qualification in architecture in one of the schools of architecture invited to participate." The list (available here in PDF format) is a full one: ten pages long, with universities from Albania to Vietnam. A list of previous winners is below, showing many from the UK but others well beyond the British Isles.

The deadline for applications is 5pm on Friday April 24, 2020.

Past RIBA Norman Foster Scholars:

2019: Siti Nurafaf Ismail - University of Malaya, Malaysia
2018: Steven Hutt - University of Greenwich, UK
2017: Chloe Loader - University of Lincoln, UK
2016: Abel Feleke - University of Western Australia, Australia
2015: Charles Palmer - University of Sheffield, UK
2014: Joe Paxton - Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), UK
2013: Sigita Burbulyte - Bath University, UK
2012: Thomas Aquilina - Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, UK
2011: Sahil Bipin Deshpande - Rizvi College of Architecture, Mumbai, India
2010: Andrew Mackintosh - Robert Gordon University, UK
2009: Amanda Rivera - Universidad del Bio Bio, Chile
2008: Faizan Jawed - Rizvi College of Architecture, Mumbai, India
2007: Ben Masterton-Smith - Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), UK