A website documenting fieldwork, research, and speculative design explorations
Helena is an experienced designer who has worked across a range of sectors, from master-planning and strategic infrastructure to public realm proposals. Helena’s work focuses primarily on the exploration of alternative sustainable development practices and regenerative building materials. She is particularly interested in speculating how the application of bioregionalism could enable positive socio-environmental change.
Helena has an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Cambridge, with Distinction. Her project ‘Developing the Dearne’ was shortlisted for the AJ Student Award for Sustainability 2021 and nominated for the RIBA Silver Presidents Medal. Her research interests include designing for resilience in post-industrial rural peripheries. She is currently undertaking a research fellowship with the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust on alternative development frameworks using renewable construction materials.
Helena has acted as a Graduate Consultant for Central Saint Martins, working as a collaborator, visiting tutor and critic. She led a team of undergraduate and postgraduate students at CSM in a live competition to deliver a detailed eco-concept store for LVMH. She also co-designed and built a demountable timber pavilion for the human rights charity Free Tibet. Her previous design work has been nominated for the MullenLowe NOVA Award and was presented in the Lethaby Gallery during the London Design Festival in 2016.
Helena works as a Senior Designer at 5th Studio Architecture and Urbanism where she has worked on studies proposing networks from Cambridge City Centre to surrounding towns and villages for the Greater Cambridge Greenways project. She has also completed work on the public realm proposals for Oriel Square in Oxford, speculative master-planning for industrial and residential intensification in Brent, and retrofit of an existing building within a conservation area in Oxford.