"As a student, I won a prize that allowed me to spend a summer travelling through Europe and to study first-hand buildings and cities that I knew only from the pages of books. It was a revelation – liberating and exhilarating in so many ways.

Today, it is the privilege of the Norman Foster Foundation to support the RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship, which I hope will have a lasting legacy – offering the chance for discovery and the inspiration for exciting new work – for generations to come." Lord Foster

The RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship offers one scholarship of £7,000 to a student of architecture to support international research on a topic and at locations of their choice.

The topic of the research should, however, relate to the sustainable survival of our cities and towns and fall under one of the following themes:

  • learning from the past to inform the future
  • the future of society
  • density of settlements
  • use of resources
  • quality of urban life
  • transport

Eligibility criteria

To be eligible to apply, students must be enrolled in, and have successfully completed at least the first year of a professional qualification in architecture from a school invited by the RIBA.

Applications will be considered from individual students only.

Each invited school can submit one application only for the scholarship from one of its current students, and each school chooses its own method of selecting its student.

See the list of schools invited by the RIBA (PDF)

Selection criteria

Submissions will be judged by a panel comprising:

  • Lord Foster
  • Simon Allford, RIBA President
  • one member of staff from the Norman Foster Foundation
  • one judge invited by the Norman Foster Foundation
  • one judge invited by the President of the RIBA

The judges will seek to award a student who demonstrates the potential for outstanding achievement and original thinking on issues relating to the survival and the future of our cities and towns.

The successful applicant will be notified after the judging in June 2022, and the travel should take place between July and October 2022. Upon the completion of the travel, the student will be invited to present their research at the Norman Foster Foundation.

How to apply

Once selected by your school, students will need to submit the following:

  • one completed application form (Word) signed by the student AND by the Head of School
  • one A1 ‘poster’ presented as a pdf file detailing the proposal (topic, objective, locations). Applicants are restricted to 500 words on the poster submission, and images should be high-resolution.

Full details of the application process can be found in the Application Guidance Notes (PDF).

Completed applications (including the application form and A1 ‘poster’) must be submitted via a web-based file transfer service (such as WeTransfer or Google Drive) to [email protected] by the deadline of 17:00 (GMT) on Tuesday 7 June 2022.

Applications received after this time will not be accepted.