RIBA Announces Awards for Best New UK Buildings
Project:
61 Oxford Street
Firm:
Allford Hall Monaghan Morris
Location:
Soho, London, England
This building represents a contemporary beat on the eastern end of Oxford Street, composed of a clever ‘sandwich’ of flexible use wrapped in a sensuous glass skin.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Timothy Soar
Project:
ARK All Saints Academy and Highshore School
Firm:
Allford Hall Monaghan Morris
Location:
Camberwell, London, England
The facades use simple materials to achieve external elevations that feel very sophisticated and refined. This is an important part of raising ambition, expectations and standards in a challenging area.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Timothy Soar
Project:
Banbridge Health and Care Centre
Firm:
Kennedy FitzGerald Architects
Location:
Banbridge, County Down, Northern Ireland
A lawn roof above Daycare accommodation allows the building to merge with the landscape and provides an attractive outlook for those working at upper levels. On plan the building is organised around two central external courtyards with public circulation around these courtyards allowing natural light and views of landscape and planting into the building.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Felix O'Hare
Project:
City of Glasgow College, Riverside Campus
Firm:
Michael Laird Architects/Reiach and Hall Architects
Location:
Glasgow, Scotland
Located at the edge of a major crossing of the River Clyde, the site marks a gateway in the city and projects the College’s importance as a civic institution as well as creating a new landmark. New buildings are organised around two civic spaces - a cloistered garden and a grand hall - which encourage students to mix and realise opportunities for learning across disciplines.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Keith Hunter
Project:
Corner House
Firm:
DSDHA
Location:
Fitzrovia, London, England
DSDHA’s analysis of the Charlotte Street Conservation Area identified and led to the restoration of key local features of typical Fitzrovian terraces, with an emphasis on verticality – where strong horizon lines mark a tripartite division of plinth-body-roof – and masonry construction, with punched apertures and a high ratio of wall to window.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Christoffer Rudquist
Project:
Ely Court
Firm:
Alison Brooks Architects Ltd
Location:
South Kilburn, London, England
This is an accomplished, stylish scheme that far exceeds the request that it be 'tenancy blind', adding to the area greatly through considered design and landscaping.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Paul Riddle
Project:
Greenwich Gateway Pavilions
Firm:
Marks Barfield Architects
Location:
Greenwich, London England
A floating canopy above the pavilions forms a shelter for frequent artistic and community events on the peninsula. The curved canopy has a patinated brass edge, which forms the last ripple emanating from the O2 Arena. The glazed pavilions are visually connected, by an arrangement of curved tubes fixed to the underside of the canopy. These tubes make a magnetic field pattern, which link back to and clad the central cores of the two pavilions.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Timothy Soar
Project:
Greenwich Housing
Firm:
Bell Phillips Architects
Location:
Greenwich, London England
A At a strategic scale the formal articulation of the building is flexible and clever, allowing the same typology to sit harmoniously on six different sites, with changes in brickwork to create relationships with its immediate context. The elevations had an intimate and varied scale that was equally comfortable as a terrace row and on a stand-alone back-land site. Brick and zinc are the main elements of a simple and robust palette of materials.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Edmund Sumner
Project:
Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute
Firm:
Allies and Morrison
Location:
Denmark Hill, London, England
The building all at once connects to the high street, the hospital campus and the adjacent residential terraces. The play between the different scales is very successful. The building is monumental whilst also referencing the domestic through a clever change in scale. At both scales, the facades respond with clarity and conviction and a remarkable sensitivity towards the neighbouring housing.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Ståle Eriksen
Project:
Murphy House Edinburgh, Scotland
Firm:
Richard Murphy Architects
Location:
Edinburgh, Scotland
This house is as intricately crafted as a precision watch. It boldly challenges its context in Edinburgh's douce New Town and is a unique one-off, designed with consummate skill.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Keith Hunter
Project:
Newport Street Gallery
Firm:
Caruso St John Architects
Location:
Vauxhall, London, England
This is an approach to conservation at once radical and sensitive, based on a deep appreciation of the qualities of the host building and the potential of the new programme. The internal restructuring is forthright and unsentimental, giving a powerful and coherent set of gallery rooms that are able to show the most challenging individual works but also very ambitious large shows. This is combined with materiality and detailing that are exquisite, including the outrageously virtuosic staircases, which achieve a strong sense of traditional craftsmanship using contemporary technologies.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Hélène Binet
Project:
Regent High School,
Firm:
Walters & Cohen Architects
Location:
Somers Town, London, England
The arcade makes best use of excellent Victorian school buildings and exploits the high ceilings of the original building – ‘the Victorians gift to us’, as the architects put it – to give the arcade and the new communal and teaching spaces a real sense of generosity.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Dennis Gilbert
Project:
Sir John Soane Museum
Firm:
Julian Harrap Architects LLP
Location:
Holborn, London, Englan
What gives this outstanding conservation project particular distinction has been the commendable attention given by the architects, working in close collaboration with the Museum’s staff, other members of the professional team and specialist craftsman and contractors, to extensive documentary research, detailed analysis of the existing building and its features and a highly sensitive approach to change, enabling visitors to enjoy and appreciate the work of one of England’s greatest architects.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Gareth Gardner
Project:
Wilton's Music Hall
Firm:
Tim Ronalds Architects
Location:
Wapping, London, England
The building project was not an academic restoration in a conventional manner, but restoration driven by aesthetics: preserving the building’s character and the items revealed during the building work. The architects followed a principle of ‘doing only what is essential’ and ‘an enormous amount of care and ingenuity went into apparently doing nothing’. This of course is an understatement. The Hall has been invisibly strengthened, sound-proofed, heated and ventilated. Everything possible was preserved: from disused roofs, Georgian brickwork, fragments of plaster, ceramic electrical fittings, to an abandoned birds nest.
Photo courtesy of RIBA © Hélène Binet
The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) today announced the winners of this year’s National Awards, which recognize the best new buildings built in the United Kingdom. The forty-six winning buildings, sixteen of which are in London, range from an art gallery expansion to an inner-city school restoration to an Oxford library by the firm of the late Zaha Hadid.
According to RIBA President Jane Duncan, this year’s selections intended to focus on smaller-scale (“but no less ambitious”) projects like the restoration of Wilton Music Hall in London, while also focusing on architecture with a civic and social focus. To that end, there are a number of schools and hospitals included among this year’s winners, including Banbridge Health and Care Centre in Northern Ireland, an integrated medical facility with an open-air courtyard and a turf-covered roof, and Greenwich Housing, a 60-unit complex of “clean, simple, and elegant” low-rent housing in the Greenwich neighborhood of London.
There was also a large showing of galleries and cultural spaces on the list, including Marks Barfield Architects’s Greenwich Gateway Pavilion, a multi-volume shopping center and community space next to London’s O2 Arena. Also chosen was Jullian Harrap Architects’s “highly sensitive” transformation of the Sir John Soane Museum in London, which was featured in RECORD last year.
