RIBA Stirling Prize 2007 Expert's View

Date Published:

24/06/2008

Credit: Nigel Young

The Architects' Journal's Reviews Editor appraises this year’s Stirling Prize shortlist and offers up his opinion on who might emerge victorious.

Credit: Warwick Sweeney

This year’s Stirling line-up pitches the would-be icon of OMA’s Casa da Música against Haworth Tompkins’ self-effacing remodelling of the Young Vic Theatre, and the grandiose civic landmark of Dresden Station, which has been redeveloped in a High-Tech spirit by Foster + Partners, against the rusticity (albeit sophisticated) of Glenn Howells' Savill Building.

Credit: DCA

And then there’s David Chipperfield. His America’s Cup Building is a stage awaiting race days, when the viewing platforms come alive with crowds. Empty, it exemplifies the the rigour and repose that is his practice’s hallmark. But the practice’s Museum of Modern Literature is a much more demanding commission that sees Chipperfield at his most thoughtful. With its reinterpreted Classicism, its fusion of solidity, sobriety and elegance, it dignifies its literary contents, suggesting that, here at least, culture and history are taken seriously.

It’s not striving to be an icon, like OMA’s Casa da Música. For all its ingenuity (seen mostly in the circulation) there has to be a question mark against this building. It almost totally forgets urbanism and is happy to be alien.

Credit: Nigel Young

With the task of redeveloping Dresden Station, Foster + Partners was on familiar ground. Since the Royal Academy’s Sackler Galleries of 1991, the practice has integrated its own aesthetic with historic buildings, and of course it’s at home with big sheds. But hasn’t the Stirling Prize rewarded this strain of architecture amply already?

Glenn Howells’ site for the Savill Building is by long-established gardens in a Royal Park, and to create anything of architectural significance in such a setting is a triumph. But all the architecture is in the long undulating timber gridshell roof and that’s maybe not enough for it to win.

Credit: Philip Vile

Working with William Howell’s 1970 building at the Young Vic Theatre, Haworth Tompkins has realised an ego-free amalgamation of new and old. This is intelligent accretive architecture. But maybe there’s just not enough obvious new work here for the Stirling judges?

Credit: Jorg Von Bruchhausen

There certainly is at Marbach. The Museum of Modern Literature makes a statement that there’s more to architecture than a signature style; that historical precedent can inform a building without it simply becoming a pastiche; and that culture is valued in itself, not as a branch of the entertainment industry.

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