Metropolitan Architecture - Porto
Credit: Phillipe Ruault
The Casa da Musica concert hall is a building full of scenographic moments and ironic gestures. A series of spaces, sequences and staircases negotiate their way around the auditorium. Aluminium-clad steps rise and turn, following the beautifully made concrete shell - the space sometimes soaring up to the roof, crossed by the forms of smaller rooms above.
Credit: Phillipe Ruault
The auditorium is a fixed-rake box whose design is determined by acoustics. The ends are defined by double-skin walls of sinuous corrugated glass. They provide acoustic enclosure and dramatically distorted views to the outside. The side walls are punctuated by more large windows of rippling glass giving views into and from other key spaces in the building.
Intriguing, disquieting and dynamic, the Casa is both genre-defying musical venue, and a strange, enigmatic and compelling object in the urban form of the city of Porto.
Glenn Howells Architects - Windsor Great Park
Credit: Warwick Sweeney
This project is a good modern interpretation of that great British traditional form: the 'pavilion in the park'. The Savill Building, a Visitor Centre that creates a gateway to the listed gardens, takes the form of a dramatic gridshell structure made of timber from Windsor Park in which it sits.
Credit: Gareth Gardner
The roof is a distinctive undulating form. It ripples over everything, the gridshell twisting and turning like bones beneath an animal's skin. This innovative use of traditional materials means that it harmonises well with a skyline of mature trees, as well as being an object of great beauty and grace in its own right.
Watch the 3MW video of the Casa da Musica and the Savill Building
Who won the RIBA Stirling Prize 2007? Entrants ranged from a parliament to a museum
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