RIBA Stirling Prize 2007 Architects' Journal's Top 50

Date Published:

24/06/2008

As part of 2007's RIBA Stirling Prize celebrations we've teamed up with the Architects' Journal to bring you their 50 favourite buildings from this millennium! Take a look through their picks and see if you agree with their choice of 50 British architectural gems.

Below are 10 of the best new buildings - with the rest of the selection on the following four pages.

Credit: BDP

Hampden Gurney (Vertical) School

Marylebone, London
BDP
Being, as a small child, prone to having my head located somewhere among the cumulonimbus, I would often find myself dreaming up my ‘fantasy school,’ occasionally even constructing crude Lego representations of this wild and exciting paradise. One imagines that someone at BDP must have had a similarly misspent youth, if this beehive-inspired school in central London is anything to go by. Replacing a two-storey post-war building with limited floor space, the architects took an innovative approach to this eternal inner-city problem by making a virtue of the need to build upwards. This lends itself perfectly to the school structure, with pupils ‘growing up’ through different levels of the honeycomb-styled building. Sustainability is also crucial to BDP’s designs with renewable energy and carbon-reducing strategies employed wherever possible. The first ‘vertical school’ structure of its kind, its designer Tony McGuirk sees it as ‘a giant adventure playground’ with each floor having a themed ‘play garden’ to complement the slightly more traditional classrooms. As if we needed any more reasons to wish we were six again…

Selfridges

Birmingham
Future Systems
Arriving into New Street station for the first time in a few years, you can’t help but notice something different about Birmingham. Among the fading grey concrete of the departing century, some kind of alien organic craft seems to have landed in the West Midlands. A closer look reveals it to be nothing more than the Selfridges wing of the recent Bullring shopping centre development. A mere earth building, then, but what a building! Designed by the appropriately named Future Systems, it is easily one of the most confidently imposing pieces of architecture to have parked itself on the English landscape in the past five years. It is the brainchild of Czech architect Jan Kaplicky, supported by and feeding into the ‘retail-led regeneration’ that has been instrumental in transforming the image of Birmingham. Love or hate this modern day cathedral for worshippers of the credit card, it’s the bold steps of innovators like Kaplicky that are likely to set Britain’s architectural agenda for years to come.

Artist's House, Roche Court

East Winterslow, Wiltshire
Munkenbeck + Marshall
Part of the New Art Centre and permanent sculpture park at Roche Court near Salisbury, the Artists’ House is a multi-purpose ‘idealised living environment’ designed by Stephen Marshall of Munkenbeck and Marshall. Its primary purpose is as a functioning extension to the main gallery, enabling works by modern artists like Gavin Turk to be displayed in an intimate ‘domestic’ setting, divorced from the alienating context of a traditional art gallery environment. Beyond this, it also offers amenities for visiting guests and, most interestingly, can act as a place of residence and even work for artists exhibiting at the gallery. The open-plan modern Scandinavian feel to the former dairy is dominated by large frameless glass sheets, letting in views that change its character with the seasons and complete its harmonious relationship with the picturesque traditional surroundings.

Laban Centre

Deptford, London
Herzog & de Meuron Combining cutting-edge facilities with an organic-feeling design that gives as much to the local community as it takes, the Laban Centre is one of the world’s most respected contemporary dance conservatories. Its dancers’ innovative moves are imitated in the fluid styles employed by visual artist Michael Craig-Martin, who previously worked with Herzog & de Meuron on the illuminated tip of the Tate Modern’s chimney. The Laban’s revolutionary semitransparent multicoloured exterior allows passers-by to catch glimpses of the semi-visible activities inside by day, and it projects atmospheric light into the surrounding streets by night. Its reciprocal integration with its Deptford environment is completed by the incorporation of a special ‘brown roof’ in the main structure, a purpose-designed habitat for one of the country’s rarest birds.

Credit: Edward Cullinan Architects, photographer Gareth Mantle

Downland Gridshell

Sussex
Edward Cullinan Architects Runner-up for the 2003 RIBA Stirling Prize, and winner of numerous other prestigious awards, the Gridshell is a highly unusual structure forming part of the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum. The museum places a collection of almost 50 reconstructed historical buildings in a beautiful stretch of countryside in the South East. The Gridshell is a central storage space, research facility, and working conservation unit that employs complex techniques to create a modern bulding which does not jar in character with the historical exhibits surrounding it. The building, designed by Buro Happold and Edward Cullinan Architects, was the first of its kind in Britain. Popularised in the 1940s by German architect Frei Otto, a gridshell is a highly elaborate piece of work employing supportive double curvature in a lattice structure. Locally-sourced wood was used in the construction of this particular gridshell, and its undulating curves also ensure that it’s a perfect aesthetic match for its surroundings.

Palestra Building

Southwark, London
Alsop Architects
The Bankside quarter of Southwark is an area of London that has developed hugely over the last five years, thanks in no small part to the presence of the Tate Modern. The latest distinctive addition to the area is Palestra, a spacious office building designed by Will Alsop. It takes its name from the ancient Greek word for gymnasium or wrestling school, and while its use here is rather more prosaic, its design is anything but. Built up in stacked-box sections, its distinctive pod-shaped retail section offers a striking street-level impact, and the upper floors overhang the main building, clad in highly reflective panels, dazzing on a bright day. Palestra is fitted with rooftop solar power cells and fourteen wind turbines, with the aim of reducing the buiding’s carbon emissions by 3,300 tonnes over its lifetime.

Credit: Sue Barr

Anderson House

Central London
Jamie Fobert
Entirely surrounded by eight-metre high walls, in the centre of a residential block, and with only one-metre wide access from the street, Jamie Fobert’s central London house deserves a prize for creative use of space, if nothing else. It has been certainly been well-rewarded, with honours including the 2003 RIBA Manser Medal for the best house in the UK. For what is to all intents and purposes an ‘invisible building,’ clever use of light and concrete lend it a remarkable substantiality. Fobert describes his main architectural motivation as ‘the improvement of life for the user and the creation of crafted and inspired spaces.’ Deliberately rejecting showy grand statements and uncovering potential in the unlikeliest of places, unique challenges like the Anderson House exemplify his work.

The Unity Building

Liverpool
Allford Hall Monaghan Morris
As Liverpool moves ever closer to its stint as European City of Culture in 2008, it is buildings like this two-towered, mixed use development that are really starting to make the city look the part. Locally-born architect Paul Monaghan took inspiration and name for the project from Le Corbusier’s famous Unité d’Habitation development, built in Marseilles in the 1940s. As well as containing the area’s first new-build office accommodation in thirty years, the towers host 161 residential apartments, including two penthouse floors which overhang one tower in spectacularly precarious-looking fashion. The Unity Building has provoked some local controversy for its monochromatic ‘Dazzle Camouflage’ colour scheme, and the penthouse section has been rather unflatteringly dubbed ‘The Portacabin’ in some quarters. The overwhelming response has been positive, though, and the building has received well-deserved plaudits from RIBA.

Credit: Feilden Clegg Bradley

Cold War Exhibition Display Building

RAF Museum Cosford, Shropshire
Feilden Clegg Bradley
The building housing the new National Cold War Exhibition at the RAF Museum in Shropshire is a masterpiece of simple but expressive form. The two large triangular structures divided by a central walkway explicitly mimic the tensions between political superpowers that marked the post-war period. Low energy conservation heating and natural ventilation mean that harmful environmental impact is kept to an appropriate planet-preserving minimum. The exhibition houses a collection of rare period aircraft, but it’s the building itself that has really been attracting plaudits. Strikingly modern, and covering over 8000 square metres, the Feilden Clegg Bradley design has been admired by over 250,000 visitors since its opening in February 2007.

Millennium Village Housing

London
Proctor & Matthews
The Millennium Village housing scheme was described by John Prescott as a ‘template for life in the twenty-first century.’ Despite the dubious forward-thinking credentials of the speaker, Proctor & Matthews’s second phase of this intriguing development certainly offers an exciting new vision of affordable high-density housing for the future. The Greenwich-based scheme has been showered with awards, including honours from RIBA and the Civic Trust, and a WWF Sustainable New Homes Award in 2004. Despite working with pre-fabricated construction materials, towards ‘the house that can be delivered on the back of a lorry,’ Proctor & Matthews have given the much-maligned post-war prefab a stylish modern makeover. The houses exceeded stringent environmental targets and offer a unique level of flexibility, with sliding walls offering the opportunity for new occupants to reorganise the layout of the apartments to their own tastes.