Festival of the Future puts 13 student projects on show in Battersea

Thirteen student projects from five London universities go on show at Festival of the Future 2026, a two-day event produced by Beyond the Box CIC at the Royal College of Art, Battersea, in October.

The festival's school show gathers emerging talent from the University of Westminster, London Metropolitan University, Ravensbourne University London, the Architectural Association School of Architecture and Central Saint Martins. Students were selected by their schools. The work spans RIBA Part 1, Part 2 and integrated MArch study, and tackles what organisers call "the questions defining architecture's future": climate and regenerative design, reuse and material reinvention, care and community, and who gets to shape the places we share.

A festival statement said: "From waste reimagined as civic ground to buildings designed to be dismantled and reused, the work is ambitious, socially driven and rooted in real places." Beyond the Box added that the festival exists "to prove a simple point: it takes a whole sector to open up a profession."

What does the reuse agenda look like?

Reuse and material reinvention runs through nearly every submission. At Ravensbourne University London, three BA (Hons) Architecture students working with tutors Darren Stacey, Hwei Fan Liang, Andy Costa, Giulliana Giorgi, Guy Sinclair and Laura Stargala tackled the theme head-on.

Callum Copping's "Within the Frame" converts a disused warehouse between a busy road and a river into flexible workshop and studio space for the local community. The redesign works around four ideas addressing embodied carbon, low energy use and ecological diversity.

Alex Naylor's "The Circular Yard" is a shared workshop built from materials sourced from the existing structure and from buildings being deconstructed across London. Naylor described the architecture as "intentionally minimal and raw, leaving materials exposed so their previous lives remain visible." The project, he said, is "designed to evolve through ongoing cycles of use, dismantling and reuse."

Olivia Walling's "Re:Make Garden" turns a waste-filled site into a community learning and making space, retaining elements of the existing structure and reusing brick from the site. Walling said the project "forms a space for all generations to meet, learn, make and reconsider their relationship with waste."

How do students connect architecture to food, energy and infrastructure?

At the University of Westminster, MArch student Ava Macgregor, supervised by Arthur Mamou-Mani and Toby Burgess, designed "The Pepper Exchange" for the Lea Valley. The proposal captures waste heat from liquid-cooled data servers to grow sweet peppers year-round in high-tech greenhouses, integrating housing, community gardens and a public restaurant. Macgregor framed the project as "reframing digital infrastructure as a civic urban resource rather than an isolated industrial object."

At the Architectural Association, Eda Samgul's "Subsidence" reimagines sinkhole landscapes in central Anatolia as spatial conditions with their own agency. A double-helical descent extends into the sinkhole, where spaces for dwelling, learning and animal care unfold. Samgul, taught by Jisoo Hwang and Sho Ito, wrote that "subsidence proposes an architecture that sustains the continuity of pastoral life within an unstable landscape."

AA student Félix Perier's "Towards the New Station" resists corporate redevelopment on the Isle of Dogs by extending the structural grid of the last standing low-rise on Marsh Wall into a new public plaza. Perier, supervised by Valentin Bontjes van Beek and Rory James Sherlock, called the work "an act of symbolic and tectonic resistance to the area's immense corporate pressure."

AA student Aiden Lee's "Next Valley" looks to Hamina, Finland, asking: "When the age of AI and data storage ends, what will become of the data centres?" Lee, supervised by Ioana Man and Ana Nicolaescu, described Hamina as "a town of constant friction between the local and global, a symbiotic relationship."

How are care and community addressed?

Central Saint Martins BA Architecture students offered several proposals grounded in everyday civic life. Shuncheng Lin's "Moo Moo Meadow" retrofits a dementia care centre, sports hall and nursery in Ladywell into a "metabolic village" centred on cows. Lin cited "intergenerational bond and experiential learning" and said the project "utilises waste from one space as an opportunity for another."

Amlyn Evans's "Re-Commoning the People's Forest" proposes a workshop in Epping Forest that combines ceramics, construction and theatre, using historic clay pits as construction material. Evans wrote: "The workshop exists as a fluctuating fusion of temporal and material layers, with nomadic scaffold and timber structures adapting upon an expanding base of forest clay."

Seren Baldwin's "Wastescape," set between the British Library and the Francis Crick Institute, casts real waste in plaster to design a "civic third place" in Somers Town. Baldwin asked: "How can architecture make hidden systems visible, and how might waste support a new typology of third place for collective learning, exchange and civic renewal?"

Miriam Iuga's "Opening the Ground" reimagines Set Social in Peckham as a deliberate framework for spontaneous encounters. "By weaving together collective rituals like gardening, cooking and eating, the architecture opens up to invite fluid movement," Iuga wrote.

What broader questions does the school show raise?

The London Metropolitan University contributions include a first-year BA group's library and reading room study in East London, exploring light and shadow, and Unit 8's MArch investigation of "impermanence," asking: "If we have to build anew today, how do we do it? What goes up?" The unit, led by Takero Shimazaki and Jonathan Mortlock, designed a mews house in South London and a reused mixed-use building at Haggerston Park.

The Festival of the Future 2026 runs alongside workshops, talks, portfolio clinics and panels with leading practices, universities and civic organisations. Beyond the Box's stated mission to "create equity by design" points to a continuing effort to widen access to a profession whose incoming cohort is shaping, in concrete proposals, the agenda for climate-responsive, reuse-first practice.