Rather like contenders for best in show at Crufts, where the perfect chihuahua is obliged to do battle with the perfect great dane, the new British buildings vying for this year’s Stirling prize for excellence in architecture are supremely dissimilar in scale, style and purpose. The shortlist encompasses a medical research centre, almshouse, college of fashion, two houses and a quintessential national monument. Geographically, though, they are conspicuously less disparate, with four schemes in London, one in Hastings and one in Cambridge, which begs the question: is there really no noteworthy new architecture north of the Fens?
Historically associated with pastoral benevolence and distressed gentlefolk, the almshouse gets a modern reboot by architects Witherford Watson Mann. Their Appleby Blue development in Bermondsey, London, is a place of care and shelter, but above all, social connection. The human theatre of residents in its voluminous garden room can be appreciated from the street through a glazed walkway projecting out along the main facade like a shop window. “The idea was to build right in the heart of the community, not to hide people away,” says project architect Stephen Witherford. Both in its architecture and operation, Appleby Blue is a consciously extroverted presence and a retort to the notion that older people (especially poorer older people) should be shunted to the margins, with adverse effects on their mental and physical health.
Swiss practice Herzog and de Meuron’s forte is devising statement buildings for institutional clients, exemplified by the mammoth crystalline doughnut of the Discovery Centre, designed with BDP for pharma titan AstraZeneca. Being in Cambridge, albeit on a peripheral biomedical campus near Addenbrooke’s hospital, there are nods to the archetype of the college court (quads being the preserve of Oxford), with a lawn-lined central enclave. Wrapped in faceted glazing, which, through cunning flexes of geometry, becomes a sawtooth roof, it’s a classic object building in a landscape, executed with enviable precision, a piece of architectural haute couture that puts its dowdier campus neighbours in the shade.
Formerly based in Oxford Street next to the John Lewis flagship store, the London College of Fashion (LCF) and its attendant satellites have now consolidated and decamped to Allies and Morrison’s “vertical campus” in the expanding cultural quarter of Stratford, London’s East Bank. While its 5,500 students may hanker for John Lewis’s legendary haberdashery department, they have the compensation of soaring atriums, Escher-esque staircases and panoramic views from the LCF’s whopping 17 storeys. Billed as the highest higher education building in the UK, the LCF forms a muscular armature for a teeming anthill of creative endeavour.
The two houses on the shortlist, Hastings House by Hugh Strange and Niwa House by Takero Shimazaki, are elegant exercises in how to create atypical, modern domestic spaces. Elevating an otherwise quotidian domestic refurbishment, Hugh Strange augments a floridly eccentric Victorian dwelling – all stained glass, fretted barge boards and decorative clay tiles – with a series of simple, interlocking timber-framed rooms.
Niwa House transforms a derelict site at the back of a terrace in Southwark, London. The Japanese inflected design emphasises the relationship between house and garden (niwa), exploring the concept of engawa, a covered corridor running along the perimeter of traditional Japanese dwellings. Conceived as a modest, lightweight pavilion, the house is a continuous series of fluid, open-plan spaces, with sliding doors and glazed walls that open up to unify its interior with gardens and courtyards.
And finally, after five years shrouded in Christo-like wrappings, the Palace of Westminster’s gleamingly restored Elizabeth Tower and the bongs of Big Ben within it resume their place at the heart of national life, courtesy of conservation specialists Purcell and a battalion of craftspeople. The most comprehensive repair programme in its 160 years restores Pugin’s original Victorian colour scheme of Prussian blue and gold for the four clock faces, strips away the bodges of previous restoration cycles and adds a new visitor lift, eliminating the ordeal of having to wheeze up 334 steps to the top of the tower.
While the project represents a singular triumph of conservation, existential issues continue to assail the rotting, neo-gothic wedding cake of the Palace of Westminster, with its 1,100 rooms, 100 staircases, 31 lifts and three miles of corridors. The story so far is of rising costs as political and public debate grinds on about how to make it remotely fit for purpose.
Predictions about a likely Stirling winner are always a hostage to fortune, but whoever scoops the tiara should know that the Stirling imprimatur is no guarantee of architectural immortality. Earlier this year, demolition was due to begin on Hodder Associates’ Centenary Building at the University of Salford, the very first winner of the prize in 1996. Lauded at the time as a “dynamic, modern and sophisticated exercise in steel, glass and concrete”, it stood empty for eight years, failed to be listed and will soon be razed to make way for new housing.
