FOLLOWING the recent announcement of the ten RIAS award-winning projects for 2026, the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland has now confirmed the winners of this year’s special category awards.
Comprising seven additional accolades, these each recognise a unique or interesting element of a project’s design, narrative or impact.
The seven special category awards winners are:
RIAS & Luths Services Sustainability Award – Iorram by Baillie Baillie Architects
The RIAS & Luths Services Sustainability Award recognises projects that use innovative approaches to design, materials, construction and more, to further sustainability goals.
Iorram is a model of how personal passion, precision, innovation, and environmentally conscious thinking can converge in micro-living, delivering a home that is described as being both ‘highly functional and profoundly poetic’. Its approach to sustainability is rooted in an emphasis on natural building materials and monolithic construction that values thermal mass. The use of homegrown, local timber helps to balance low-embodied carbon material with longevity and climate resilience – while also creating healthy spaces that support wellbeing.
This project also won the RIAS & CTI Timber Award, which encourages the innovative and creative use of timber in new buildings in Scotland, promoting the use of homegrown timber, with added consideration given to thoughtful and appropriate use of different species.
RIAS & Equitone Project Architect Award – Natasha Huq, GRAS for Preston Tower, Doocot and Gardens
The RIAS & Equitone Project Architect Award recognises an architect for their leadership, expertise and contribution to a project.
The work at Preston Tower involved the ‘sensitive and inspiring’ restoration of a historic ruin set within a community garden. Natasha Huq – an associate and conservation accredited architect at GRAS – received this award for her contribution to all aspects of this project.
RIAS & TCM Capital Innovation Award – Edinburgh Futures Institute by Bennetts Associates
This A-listed Victorian infirmary building was in very poor condition, with extensive dry rot, water penetration and structural issues. The practice’s transformation of the building has brought its historic architecture boldly into the future. Edinburgh Futures Institute now integrates complex new interventions with extensive renovations and the uncovering of existing fabric.
This project also won the RIAS & Laurence McIntosh Award for Architectural Interior, which champions architectural interior design excellence, celebrating projects that have focused on the interior layout of a building and how the interiors enhance the user experience. Where the former infirmary was designed with long corridors and limited access to enable infection control, new arrangements on both sides of the corridors now deliver a substantial communal resource – replacing separation with integration. This features a range of flexible spaces for various audience sizes, including a major event space below a new public square.
RIAS & Gilmour & Aitkin Client of the Year Award – Friends of Tarlair Community Group for Tarlair Outdoor Pool Pavilion by Studio Octopi
The restoration of the Tarlair Outdoor Pool Pavilion demonstrates how sensitive architecture can revive a historic site to create cultural, recreational, and community value in a meaningful and enduring way.
Throughout this journey, the community group’s dedication was described as ‘exemplary’, showing energy, determination, and fundraising skill that has been vital to the project’s progress.
RIAS & VELUX Architectural Heritage Award – The Canna House Project by LDN Architects
The Canna House Project was all about balancing pioneering conservation and intervention. Research and photographic evidence were used to help reinstate the appearance of the house in its mid-20th century heyday, and approximately 50,000 artefacts were catalogued and removed prior to construction. Works involved extensive structural repairs and strengthening, decorative restoration works, and full re-servicing, including power, data and heating.
RIAS CEO, Tamsie Thomson, said, “These special awards are an important element of the annual RIAS Awards. Whether recognising the key contributions of project architects – often architects in the early stages of their career – or buildings that push boundaries in terms of innovation, sustainability or the use of materials, the RIAS special awards allow us to focus on the key aspects and people who have made extraordinary buildings possible. We are able to make these awards thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, and we are extremely grateful to them for their hugely valuable support.”
