> NORTHERN STUDENTS SCOOP AWARDS
11 May 2008
June 2008: Northern students scooped two of the top three awards at the 3rd Annual Wood Marketing Federation (WMF) Awards for
Belfast student Karol Dempsey represented Queen’s University and was the winner of the Architecture with Wood Award. His project ‘The Walled City Family Law Court’ impressed judges because of the flexibility of his construction, bringing human warmth into public buildings.
The Wood Design Award, won by Portadown student Geoffrey Neill, hailed from Southern Regional College, Lurgan. The judges chose Geoffrey Neill’s two-piece project ‘Organic Storage, Sideboard Table’ as an overall winner because it showed a great knowledge of the use of wood, manipulating and bending timber to impressive extremes, and also taking inspiration from trees and leaves.
A total of four projects presented by students from colleges across the North of Ireland made it to this year’s finals. Queens University Belfast students Daryl Armstrong and Philip Baker, from Portadown, were short-listed for their joint project ‘Behaviour of composite timber beams’, in the Engineering section; while Neil O’Rourke, from University of Ulster Jordanstown, reached the finals for his Architectural project entitled ‘All Ireland Shared Campus’.
To reach the final was a fine achievement for the students when taking into account that over 100 projects were entered in the three categories of Engineering, Architecture and Design by third level students from both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, using wood as the main element of their final year project.
Fifteen students were drawn for the finals from universities nationwide, including DIT Mountjoy Square Dublin, Bray PLC, Southern Regional College Lurgan, Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, NUIG, Queens University Belfast, Cork IT, UCD and the University of Ulster Jordanstown.
Speaking at the awards, Duncan Stewart spoke of the high standard of entries which had been received and thanked the WMF, all the students and their lecturers for their commitment to the competition. “This year’s competition has been incredible. We have seen 15 projects at a very high standard and all the projects here today deserve to be winners.” He also highlighted the need to carry out more research on the use of wood in Ireland, as the most valuable, renewable and sustainable material that can be used in areas like design, art and engineering.
The students assembled at the start of the day and set up their presentation stands. Models were created by all teams and these were backed up by PowerPoint presentations and A1 posters and other supporting literature. The students were interviewed for RTE’s Nationwide during the day with the actual award ceremony taking place at 3.30pm.
The WMF instituted this All-Ireland award to promote the use of wood as a design and building material. The event was sponsored by Wood NI as well as Coillte, Coford, and ITTA (Irish Timber Traders Association).
Attachments:
QUB Entrants, Karol Dempsey, Daryl Armstrong, Philip Baker, Raymond Gilfillan
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