Winners announced at 52nd Structural Steel Design Awards

Top row L-R: Tintagel Footbridge, Cornwall; 52 Lime Street, London; The Curragh Racecourse Redevelopment, Kildare. Bottom row L-R: Bath Schools of Art and Design; A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon Improvement Scheme; Brunel Building, London

Six projects were Award winners at this year’s Structural Steel Design Awards (SSDA).

The six winning projects at the 52nd annual SSDA were Tintagel Footbridge, Cornwall; 52 Lime Street, London; The Curragh Racecourse Redevelopment, Kildare; Bath Schools of Art and Design; A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon Improvement Scheme, and Brunel Building, London.

From an initial shortlist of 22 projects, all of this year’s entries once again scored highly in terms of sustainability, cost-effectiveness, efficiency and innovation, with six schemes getting Commendations and two collecting Merits.

For the first time in its history, there was no gala awards ceremony for this year’s SSDA and all winners were notified by email due to COVID-19 restrictions.

The unprecedented national lockdown also had an effect on how the SSDA judges came to their all-important decisions. In all previous years, at least two judges have visited each shortlisted scheme and met in-person the project team members. However, this was not possible in 2020 and so all project teams presented their schemes remotely.

Chairman of the Judges, Chris Nash said: “Keeping a sense of normality during a global pandemic has been difficult for everyone.

“As in previous years a preliminary selection was made on the basis of a close examination of the entry documents. The entrants of resultant shortlisted schemes were then invited to present their project by ‘MS Teams’ or ‘Zoom’ to at least two judges from different disciplines.”

Commenting on the shortlisted projects, Mr Nash added: “This year there was a wide range of types of projects entered for the scheme. Scales of entry range from the largest prestige city office buildings, to smaller educational projects, and beautiful footbridges.

“The judges were particularly interested in projects that reflected a reuse of existing structures, and those that exemplified the logistics of overcoming time and spacial constraints, rather than just the beauty of the finished projects.”

Trimble Solutions UK partnered the British Constructional Steelwork Association to deliver this year’s awards.

Richard Fletcher, Regional Business Director, Trimble Buildings said: “As we look to construction to be at the forefront of assisting in the drive to return the economy back to pre-coronavirus levels, healthy, innovative and diverse structural steel and structural engineering industries will together form a significant part of that recovery.

“The entrants and winners of the SSDA in 2020 demonstrate that our industry is in a strong place.”