The brief primarily deals with placemaking alongside homemaking, promoting solutions for housebuilding challenges
The new 2025 Davidson Prize brief is asking teams of multiple disciplines to innovate in solutions for placemaking for the purpose of housebuilding.
The Davidson Prize is an annual competition for design ideas, first established in 2020.
The new Davidson Prize is encouraging new ways of thinking about housing
Open to teams that include an architect registered with the Architects Registry Board or the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, the competition is designed to encourage new ways of visually communicating around housing and promote innovation.
Due to the government’s goal of constructing 1.5m homes by mid 2029, as such, the theme around the 2025 Davidson Prize is Streets Ahead: The Race to Build 1.5M Homes.
The 1.5m target is ambitious, and all the new homes will need to ensure that the place they are built as well as the home itself is of the highest quality.
The competition is asking teams to present a visual argument for 300 homes on a UK/Irish site of their choice, exploring strategies for integrated communities, and considering the lived experience of their spaces.
The space that can be selected has very few restrictions, and can include grey, brown, or greenfield sites as well as inner city, suburban, small town, or rural areas.
The teams will need to focus on assimilation of new housing in built and natural contexts, economic and social integrations of communities, density, materiality, construction, maintenance, and stewardship.
“We still see far too many poor designs”
Pooja Agrawal, chair of the 2025 Davidson Prize jury, said: “The government’s ambition to build 1.5m homes requires not only quantity, but quality homes that are sustainable, affordable, and adaptable to the needs of diverse communities. Unfortunately, we still see far too many poor designs that fail to meet these needs. While a number of practical policy solutions are being rolled out to achieve this ambitious target, there’s also a need for creative thinking to tackle this from new directions and find unexpected results. This year’s Davidson Prize presents a real opportunity for teams to challenge the status quo and develop tangible but imaginative solutions that will help to enrich lives while supporting housing goals for the future.”
Marie Chamillard, director of the Alan Davidson Foundation, said: “In the five years since its launch, The Davidson Prize has gone from strength to strength, growing in profile and reach and contributing a wealth of ambitious new ideas to discourse around the home. Alan was a visual thinker, able to cast a human-centred spotlight on communicating architectural ideas to the wider world. He would have been delighted to see the quality and diversity of ideas the prize has generated in the past five years, proving that collaborative approaches to the world’s design challenges benefit everyone.”
Registration for the competition opened on 12 December last year, and today they theme, brief, and judges have been announced. Registration will close on the 31 January.
Entrants will then have until 27 February to submit their Stage 1 design ideas, with a billboard marketing poster and a 250-word statement.
At Stage 2, three teams will be finalised to be awarded £5,000 each, with a one-hour consultancy workshop with Hayes Davidson, and the final winner will be announced in June with a £10,000 prize.
The full brief can be read here.
