RIBA Gold Medallist Cullinan offers advice to the stars of the future

He applauded the design work by Bronze medallist Amandine Kastler and Silver medallist Steve Westcott, but said that both needed to improve their presentation skills. They were presenting along with Joanna Rapp, the winner of the dissertation prize.

Amandine Kastler (left) and Joanna Rapp

Rapp, from the University of Westminster, gave the first presentation, about her incredibly technical investigation into the drawings of Piranesi. These dealt not with his famous 'carceri' but with drawings of the bridges of Rome. She showed that, by a mastery of perspective, he was able to combine drawings from two different points, so that each arch of the bridge looked at its best. 'He used perspective more cleverly than the camera,' Rapp said. 'I have discovered his secret.'

Cullinan called this 'an absolutely breathtaking piece of work,' and added that 'when I went to a school of architecture we had to learn to set up perspective – it took weeks and often led to tears.'

RIBA president Sunand Prasad and Gold medallist Ted Cullinan at the crit

Amandine Kastler from the AA then presented her Cabinet of Curiosities, a project for the courtyard of the Victoria & Albert Museum, to display a collection of religious silver and marble statues. Dealing with the fashionable topic of ornament, she drew on precedents as diverse as the Rococo and Fallingwater to produce a design in marble and Corten, based on a combination of religious imagery and the distorted muscles of a bodybuilder.

Cullinan said that the building was 'great' and that he found the bodybuilder's muscles 'very nice and sexy'.

Steve Westcott

Finally, Steve Westcott, from the Bartlett, presented his Greenwich Perpetual Observatory, a building to be based at Greenwich's Flamsteed House, that started from an exploration of Moby Dick and went through an incredible variety of references, including the work of Kurt Schwitters and one of the Eames houses. Beautifully designed, his complex of rooms and courtyards and rooms was developed as 'a remembered room. a machine for looking'.

Cullinan, who struggled to hear much of the presentation, said that it 'didn't do justice to your fantastic capacity for drawing'. And the presentation kicked off a discussion ranging from Sunand Prasad wondering if Westcott was showing disrepect to the importance of scientific instruments, to Niall McLaughlin wondering about the nostalgia of students for a time of certainty of knowledge, before the development of Post-Modernism.

The audience at the crit was mostly of academics

Cullinan said it was extraordinary how much all design, from his generation down to that of the students, owed to the cubism of Picasso and Braque. The event ended on a high, with the students having taken some flak but received a fantastic dose of high-quality attention.

Cullinan left in uncharacteristic style, in the limo that the RIBA lays on for a couple of days for its Gold Medallists.

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