RIBA Stirling Prize 2007 Architects' Journal's Top 50

Date Published:

24/06/2008

Credit: Hopkins Architects, photography by Paul Tyagi

Evelina Children’s Hospital

London
Hopkins Architects
There can be few worthier endeavours than building a hospital for children, and this Hopkins-designed creation has certainly attracted its fair share of plaudits since opening in 2005. As well as being shortlisted for the 2006 RIBA Stirling Prize, and winning that year’s Channel 4 public vote by an overwhelming majority, the hospital has won a Civic Trust Award and was shortlisted for the Better Public Buildings award. Everything in the hospital is designed to make the patient’s stay more bearable, and even enjoyable, from regular performances and art installations, to window-cleaners donning Superman suits, and kid-friendly MRI scanners which project images of animals onto the walls. The structure itself is entirely built around the needs of children, who were represented on a special board during the design process, lending a ‘by children for children’ element to proceedings. Overlooking the gardens of Lambeth Palace, the hospital is also built around a huge atrium, meaning that patients are never cut off from natural views.

Imperial War Museum of the North

Salford, Manchester
Daniel Libeskind
Initially selected to design the buildings that are to occupy the Ground Zero site in New York, then recently sidelined for mysterious reasons, Daniel Libeskind nonetheless has an impressive pedigree in designing significant, symbolism-laden buildings. His north-west addition to the Imperial War Museum family is a striking imposition on the landscape and is defined by its multi-layered symbolic approach. Its three main sections represent broken shards of a globe, intended to promote sober reflection on the devastation of war. On a second level, they represent earth, air, and water, the three battlegrounds of conflict. The entrance is the air shard, an impressive 55 metre high tower which acts as a viewing platform, with the earth section containing the bulk of the museum’s exhibits and the final part accommodating the restaurant. The RIBA Stirling Award-shortlisted building draws on the style used by Libeskind in his design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Credit: Helene Binet

The Red House

Chelsea, London
Tony Fretton
This Chelsea townhouse, set in a conservation area overlooking Wren’s Royal Hospital, is clad with distinctive French red limestone, and while eminently practical, goes some way beyond the archetypal ‘machine for living in.’ Recognised by RIBA in 2003 and the Chicago Athenaeum International Architecture Award 2006, the £3.5million building was commissioned by a private art collector, and was also shortlisted for the Manser Prize and the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture. The rooms interlink in unique and surprising ways, with smaller rooms given as much attention as set-piece rooms like the long library, and the rooftop garden, which offers the enviable proposition of a jacuzzi-with-a-view. While the architecture of the building by Tony Fretton Architects is in itself remarkable, it is the lavish and meticulous attention to detail given to the interiors by designer Mark Pimlott that really elevates this home to a cut above the norm.

Cass Foundation Centre

Goodwood, West Sussex
Studio Downie Architects
The Foundation Centre is the second building Craig Downie has worked on for the Cass Sculpture Foundation, after the Visitor Gallery at Goodwood in 1994. The charity works towards preserving the future of 21st century sculpture, and Downie’s new 500 square metre building is central to this ambition. Its purpose is primarily as an archive and library of modern sculpture, its robust concrete structure essential to this preservative function. Set low into the chalk hillside, the exterior is covered in irregularly placed timber strips and has a mossy sedum roof-covering, working to disguise the building amongst its natural surroundings. Touches of character are subtle and often brilliantly obscure: the spacing of the wooden fins on the exterior apparently corresponds to the rhythm of the flute part from a Debussy ballet.

Credit: Warwick Sweeney

Savill Garden Visitor Centre

Windsor Park, London
Glenn Howells
Sometimes architects have little choice but to follow the rules: It was stipulated in the Crown Estate competition rules for this visitor centre at Windsor Park that its core material should be sourced from the Park’s own woodland. Yet in responding to this brief Glenn Howells chose anything but the easy option. His Savill Garden building has emerged as part of a new wave of British interest in previously exceptionally rare timber-frame grid shell buildings, led by the Weald & Downland Museum, described elsewhere in our list. By using a process which combines high-tech computer modeling with painstaking manual labour, Howells has created a contemporary building which seems to effortlessly align with the curves of the natural landscape. In another echo of the Downland Gridshell, which featured in 2002, it has been nominated for this year’s RIBA Stirling Prize.

The Underground Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park

West Bretton, Wakefield
Feilden Clegg Bradley
For the last thirty years this superb stretch of countryside just south of Leeds has been one of the best places in Europe to see modern sculpture in the open air. Though initially conceived as a ‘gallery without walls,’ in April 2003 Feilden Clegg Bradley architects were commissioned to build an indoor centre for the site. The resulting ‘Underground Gallery’ is cut into the hillside of the estate’s Bothy Garden. It has very little impact on the surrounding scenery, and provides an additional 600 square metres of gallery space to house works needing protection from the elements. It consists of three sparse ‘white cube’ spaces which deliberately refrain from detracting from the impressive works housed within. Nominated for the Gulbenkian Prize in 2006, which rewards originality, imagination and excellence in museums and galleries, the Underground Gallery’s inaugural exhibition was an acclaimed retrospective of the work of abstract artist William Turnbull. It has also received awards from RIBA, including Yorkshire Building of the Year in 2005.

Credit: Peter Cook

Jubilee Library

Brighton
Bennetts Associates
The £8 million Jubilee Library in the heart of Brighton was the 2005 winner of the Prime Minister’s Better Public Buildings Award. Succeeding on social and environmental levels, as well being recognized by RIBA for its architectural achievement, the library has seen visitor numbers treble since its opening. Designed to meet strict BREEAM guidelines, it is also one of the most energy-efficient buildings in the country, offering rainwater recycling and a low energy consumption system which results in an estimated 50% reduction in carbon emissions. It is partly subsidized by neighbouring commercial buildings in the development, and forms part of a regeneration plan for central Brighton that aims to link the North Laine quarter, leading up to the station, with the more tourist-friendly 'Lanes' area at the southern end of the city. Along with the London ‘Idea Stores’ it is part of a wave of new buildings contributing to a change in thinking about what a library needs to be in an age of digital access to information - more community space than simple book repository.

Islington Square Social Housing

New Islington, Manchester
FAT
It’s not often that future residents of a social housing scheme get to hand-pick the architects who will go on to design their new homes. That’s exactly the process that saw FAT (slogan: 'Fashion. Architecture. Taste.') chosen for this development, which was commissioned by the Manchester Methodist Housing Group and completed in 2006. The residents had almost all been living in the deteriorating Cardroom estate for around thirty years, and the 23 buildings constructed in its place aim to eliminate the flaws in layout and ambience which were seen as contributing to high levels of crime and vandalism in Cardroom’s final decade. Back-to-back terraces hark back to memories of a friendlier North, but this is no rose-tinted recreation of the past. As well as presenting an eclectic range of cutout shapes and resident-selected pastel colours, FAT’s designs were tailored to strict environmental guidelines. Both CO2 emissions and water consumption are kept to a controlled minimum, earning the Islington Square scheme a well-deserved EcoHomes ‘excellent’ rating.

Credit: Helene Binet

Nursery, John Perry Children's Centre

Dagenham, London
DSDHA
Shortlisted for the 2006 Better Public Buildings award, and a RIBA award winner in the same year, this sustainable Dagenham nursery envisages new ways of constructing buildings with children in mind. Conceived as a ‘studio for children,’ and part of a larger Children’s Centre, it forms a fourth wall of an existing courtyard, creating a ‘protected garden environment,’ with outdoor teaching areas and a predominantly glazed exterior allowing maximum light and full integration between learning areas and nature. Very much a building to delight everyone’s inner child, its features include shiny pixelated bricks, multi-height openings and ‘meandering’ corridors with open-plan meeting rooms, all contributing to a building which offers an inspirational atmosphere of creativity.

Credit: Verity Allison

Idea Store

Whitechapel
David Adjaye
A simple inscription used to be all the architectural work necessary to make libraries an attractive proposition to the man in the street. The days when the words ‘Knowledge is Power’ motivated people to walk through a library’s doors are, alas, long gone. But London’s high concept ‘Idea Store’ buildings might just have found the perfect rebranding solution. The designer of the Whitechapel branch is Ghanaian-born architect David Adjaye, who brings a touch of all-too-rare showmanship to his work, railing against the “boring, passive, nice stuff” he sees his British contemporaries producing. Nominated for 2006’s RIBA Stirling Prize, his Store goes beyond mere ideas, and paints a purposeful, colourful picture on the landscape of one of London’s most deprived areas.