Judges

Judges for 2025 are currently being confirmed. See 2024’s judges below for an example of the stellar calibre we recruit.

Julia King, design practitioner and Policy Fellow at LSE Cities

Julia King is a policy fellow at LSE Cities and director of Julia King & Associates (JK&A). Trained as an architect, her research, design practice and teaching focus on infrastructure and public space in the context of youth engagement, inequitable infrastructure developments and urban micro-culture. She is the founder and director of both the Apprenticeship Programme in City Design and the Researcher-in-Residence scheme at LSE Cities, two novel outreach models for investigating and designing urban spaces with local young people.

In 2023, King set up JK&A, her own practice outside academia which specialises in brief-development, community engagement and participatory design. JK&A devise tools and processes that enable diverse voices to contribute to design and planning decision-making, and to shaping the future of places in imaginative and equitable ways.

King has authored chapters in Home Economics and Infrastructure Space, and co-authored a chapter in The SAGE Handbook of the 21st-Century City. Her work has been recognised by many awards and institutions, including Emerging Woman Architect of the Year, NLA Award, Civic Trust Regional Award, the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award and Eurocities Awards.

Christopher Lee, co-founder and principal of Serie Architects and Arthur Rotch Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard GSD

Christopher Lee is the co-founder and Principal of Serie Architects London, Mumbai and Singapore; and leads the design of Serie across all three offices. He is Arthur Rotch Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

He previously served as Design Critic at the GSD (2011-12). Prior to that he was the Director of the AA Projective Cities MPhil Programme (2010-12) and AA Diploma and Intermediate Unit Master (2002-09 ). Lee graduated with the AA Diploma (Honors) from the AA, received the RIBA President’s Medal Commendation Award, and his Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture and Urbanism from the Berlage Institute and TU Delft. In 2017 he was appointed as a London Mayor’s Design Advocate to work on the Good Growth by Design programme addressing key challenges facing London's built environment.

Serie is the recipient of the prestigious BD Young Architect of the Year Award and was recently named as one of 10 visionary architects for the new decade by the Leading European Architects Forum and was selected by ICON as one of 20 Essential Young Architects in the world in 2008.

The practice is known for its theoretical position which emphasises the study of building typologies and their evolution. Thus, Serie advocates careful study of historical building precedents as a basis for speculating on new solutions. With a close relationship to the internationally recognised Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and Harvard Graduate School of Design in the USA where Chris Lee is a member of the academic faculty, Serie has re-opened interest in this field as one of the key areas of architectural discourse.

Anjulie Rao, Chicago-based journalist and critic covering the built environment

Anjulie Rao is a journalist and critic covering the built environment. Based in Chicago, much of her work reckons with the complexities of post-industrial cities; explores connections to place and land; and exposes intersections between architecture, landscapes, and cultural change. She is the founder and editor of Weathered, a publication focused on cities and landscapes in the wintertime.

Rao is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an adjunct faculty member at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her bylines can be found in Architect, Dwell, The Architect's Newspaper, Landscape Architecture Magazine, The Architectural Review and The New York Review of Architecture, among others.