A team of architectural graduates from the University of Tasmania has been announced as the winner of the Climate Centre Heat Adaptive Architecture Design Competition, launched last year by the International Red Cross and Red Crescent (RCRC)’s Climate Centre in partnership with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and the Global Disaster Preparedness Centre.
The team consisted of Master of Architecture graduates Shadia Afrin, Tung Rayman and Joyce Wong Qian Hui, alongside the University of Tasmania course coordinator Helen Norrie as faculty sponsor, and architect and professor of disaster resilience and recovery at the University of New South Wales, David Sanderson as mentor.
One of three overall winners in the international student competition, the Tasmanian team’s design proposed a climate-adaptive shophouse unit designed to address rising temperatures and economic precarity in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in response to a brief that called for students’ affordable and scalable solutions to address the growing threat of extreme urban heat.
The design, titled “Abash,” comprised a three-metre by three-metre modular grid structure with shaded verandas, high thermal-mass walls, ventilated floors and porous brickwork, built from local and affordable materials. It also featured a community-centred layout that preserved existing circulation paths and communal landmarks while creating shared courtyards and green edges.
The other two winners included a project to adapt a typical tin dwelling in Bangladesh by a local team and a school project in Kenya by a team from the University of Cambridge.
A media communique from the Climate Centre noted that all three winning submissions evidenced how “thoughtful, community-rooted design can make a measurable difference in the lives of those most at risk.”
The competition was open to students in their third year or above, along with graduates, from any higher-education architecture or urban design school. The three winners were chosen from a shortlist of ten finalists, who were each given a stipend to develop a prototype of their design. Models of the winning projects were displayed at the 2025 Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change COP 30 event.
Source: Architecture - architectureau
