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The RIBA Stirling Prize in association with The Architects' Journal awards £20,000 to the designers of the building that has made the greatest contribution to British architecture in the past year.
The six buildings on this year's shortlist are:
A splintered globe, a building 'emblematic of the earth shattered by conflict'. This is what Daniel Libeskind sought to create when he was commissioned to design the Imperial War Museum North.
Situated on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal, the museum was built on a budget of just £28 million and was completed in 2001, opening its doors in 2002. The trustees of the Imperial War Museum North wanted a space to house unseen collections and to bring them to a new audience in the north of the country. But they also wanted 'a statement that people would get excited about,' says Jim Forrester, director of the museum.
Libeskind delivered. The spectacular aluminium-clad building is a bold architectural commentary on the horrors of war. Its three shards – earth, water and air – represent the arenas of human conflict. The earth shard, which houses the main public areas of the museum, has curved gallery floors, designed to reflect the curvature of the earth, but also to throw visitors off-balance.
Indeed, the entire space is designed to be difficult, to make people feel uneasy, to 'catapult people into an emotional experience … to give people a real sense of empathy with those in war and conflict,' says Forrester.
Known to Londoners as the Gherkin, Swiss Re's new headquarters is extraordinary for many reasons, not least because less than six months after the building's official opening, it has already become a London icon – and a popular one at that.
Built on the site of the Victorian Baltic Exchange, which was badly damaged by an IRA bomb in 1992, the Gherkin, designed by Norman Foster, is a tall building for a city which has yet to embrace the skyscraper. Its curves make it softer, they diminish its impact on its surroundings. Its tapering shape reduces the draughts caused at pavement level by conventional tall buildings. It is also the first environmentally friendly skyscraper in the city.
That the Gherkin should be green was important to Swiss Re, since many of its clients cover the often devastating costs of global warming. This new building uses 50% less energy than a traditional office block on this scale thanks to its innovative light wells which flood the building with natural light and function as its 'lungs', bringing air to the offices.
Sadly, this radical and popular new building is closed to the public. The restaurant, situated at the very top of the tower, described by one journalist as 'almost too perfect to believe', is reserved for tenants only.
Rather than a building, The Phoenix Initiative is a £24 million regeneration project designed to restart the failing heart of Coventry city centre. Phoenix is not just about structures but about the spaces between them: the squares, gardens and plazas, and how they are connected together.
Coventry was a city desperately in need of a facelift. Heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz, it was rebuilt after the Second World War but was no model for town planners. By the 1980s the city was renowned for its derelict car parks and dull office blocks.
In the late 1990s, Coventry City Council charged MacCormac Jamieson Prichard (MJP) with the task of rejuvenating the city centre. This firm likes to create architecture which is 'informed by the past, that enriches the present and anticipates the future'.
They took the medieval ruins of Coventry's first cathedral as their starting point. From there, visitors are taken on a 'walk of 1,000 years', through gardens and squares, to the futuristic Whittle arch, named after Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine and one of Coventry's favourite sons.
While there has been some scepticism about the public art featured in the project, which has become a target for vandals, Phoenix has been well received by local people and visitors. The ghost town has been exorcised: people have returned to live and work in the heart of Coventry.
From the outside it looks a bit like a branch of Currys, but the Bexley Business Academy was designed by the man behind the Gherkin, Norman Foster. It is only once you pass through the doors that you realise why this is such a radical project.
South London has never seen a school like The Business Academy. Built in just 12 months and costing £31 million, which came from a combination of public and private sources, it is the new building for the Thamesmead Community College. And it couldn't be more different from the 1960s concrete bunker where the students used to attend lessons.
Built around three courtyards, the Academy is open-plan. There are no classrooms, but lessons are carried out in alcoves. The idea was to create a transparent space, where 'everyone could see what was going on', says David Garrard, one of Bexley's sponsors. 'It would create an atmosphere of brightness which would encourage learning.'
By thinking outside the hermetically sealed boxes in which young people are usually taught, The Business Academy has succeeded. The proportion of children at the school achieving five good grades at GCSE has leapt from just 6% to 36%. In one of London's most deprived areas, a piece of architecture is changing the lives of the next generation.
Nicknamed 'the Spike' and 'the Stiletto in the Ghetto', derided as a 'hypodermic' monument to Dublin's junkies, The Spire of Dublin is one of the Stirling Prize's more controversial finalists. It was commissioned to replace the statue of Nelson on O'Connell Street which was blown up by the IRA in the 1960s, but it makes no reference to the violent past.
This is a monument for a modern, European Ireland. The 120-metre tower has been likened to a votive candle, but was inspired, says architect Ian Ritchie, by mystical Celtic sites: 'I see it as a 21st-century interpretation of standing stones and obelisks.'
The Spire is a hollow, stainless steel shell, tapering from its base of 3 metres to just 15 centimetres. As a feat of engineering, it is unprecedented. It's beautiful, too: simple, elegant, unfussy, it reflects the changing light, its colour deepening from steel blue to almost black. It looks almost unreal, as though computer-generated.
But since there is no interior access, should The Spire be a Stirling Prize finalist? By Ritchie's own admission, 'the difference between architecture and sculpture is that the former has functioning toilets'. But he believes he's created something 'beyond art, architecture, engineering'.
The friendly alien of Graz is the first building of Peter Cook of Archigram fame, and Colin Fournier, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at University College London. Together they are known as Spacelab, and they have created the most startling finalist for the Stirling Prize.
The Kunsthaus, a contemporary art gallery, was completed in 2003. It appears to float among the historic buildings of this Austrian city, a giant, bluish biomorphic blob on the edge of the river Mur. It 'floats' because, although the core is made of concrete on a self-supporting steel frame, it rests on a glass base. The alien's plexiglass skin is used as a media façade: fluorescent tubes turn the Kunsthaus into a low-resolution screen to display messages.
The city of Graz wanted their museum, like Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, to attract attention. It is certainly capable of doing that. But how does it function as an art gallery? The glass bubble at the base houses the gallery's shop and the café which opens out into the street. Travellators take visitors to the oddly shaped exhibition spaces deep within the alien's gut. Because there are no straight walls, artists often have to design special works for the Kunsthaus. This is a gallery which shapes the art within it.
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