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A fascination with foraging restaurants - one which has served live ants - has won Architecture graduate Thomas Hobbs a chance to enrich his art with a year in Scandinavia.

Thomas won the $10,000 2012 Gus Ferguson Travel Scholarship which he will use this year to return to Scandinavia to study and photograph local architecture.

Philip Goldswain , lecturer in the School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts, and one of the judges for the award, said the winner's proposal was based on his Honours thesis on foraging restaurants in Scandinavia, including Noma, in Denmark, twice voted (and currently) Best Restaurant in the World by Restaurant magazine.

Thomas spent a year in Denmark on exchange, studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and now plans to return to further his interest in Scandinavian architecture's relationship with light, context and identity.

"It was a very strong field of candidates for the award this year," Mr Goldswain said. "Three or four graduates could have won it, but Thomas's proposal was very eloquent and very interesting.

"Gus Ferguson, the patron of the award, is an internationally renowned photographer as well as an architect whose work responds to light, so Thomas's proposal appealed to him."

Mr Ferguson is a former UWA architect, responsible for several buildings on the Crawley campus, and a keen advocate of mind-broadening travel for young architects.

The travel scholarship in his name is awarded every year to a new Architecture graduate.

Thomas said he was excited about returning to Northern Europe for "further architectural research of the Nordic terroir ."

*Noma restaurant is reported to have imported live ants from Denmark for the menu in its pop-up restaurant in London.