Posts Tagged Awards and prizes
Hadid’s dynamic but disciplined school provides a lesson for Gove
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
The Evelyn Grace Academy in south London is a worthy winner of the Stirling prize, says Rowan Moore
The choice of Evelyn Grace academy has a political ring to it. At a time when Michael Gove, and his cheerleader Toby Young, are denouncing architects for robbing the public, and denying that good design has anything to do with good education, here is a prize for a school of extreme architectural ambition.
Confusingly for Gove and Young, the school's principal, Peter Walker, has established a regime of discipline and order – neat uniforms, long school days, mobile phone bans – of the kind that they might be expected to like. It is also partly funded by Ark, the charity founded by hedge fund manager Arpad Busson. In other words, its money comes from the same sort of place as much of the Tory party's funding.
The main contribution of Zaha Hadid's architecture to the school ethos is to create an energetic, if sometimes forbidding, atmosphere. It announces that the school is a serious place, not somewhere to slouch into. The design also responds to Walker's requirements for its internal arrangements.
It is not a completely perfect fit: Hadid's dynamic style is in theory more about freedom than order, and there are some crunching details where her demanding geometry encounters the budgetary and technical constraints of state school building. Nor, in straitened times, is it a model of school building that can be repeated too often. Sarah Wigglesworth's Sandal Magna school in Wakefield, which should have been shortlisted but wasn't, is a better example of how to do a lot with a little.
The Olympic velodrome was the bookmakers' favourite and, apart from the fact that it is not yet in full use, I would have agreed with them. The velodrome achieves a better match of concept, detail and purpose. But the academy is an extraordinary achievement, and there have been far dumber choices in the history of the prize.
Rowan Moore is the Observer's architecture critic
Stirling prize: Zaha Hadid’s Brixton school beats Olympic velodrome
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
Evelyn Grace Academy wins the 16th RIBA Stirling prize, giving Hadid top award for second year running
Architect Zaha Hadid's Z-shaped school in Brixton, south London, has beaten the hot favourite, the Olympic velodrome, to win the 16th annual RIBA Stirling prize for architecture.
Victory for Evelyn Grace academy gives Hadid's practice a Stirling prize for the second year running, although it is the architect's first major building project in Britain. Last year her practice won for the Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome.
"Schools are among the first examples of architecture that everyone experiences and have a profound impact on all children as they grow up," said Hadid. "I am delighted that the Evelyn Grace academy has been so well received by all its students and staff."
The prestigious £20,000 award, handed over by the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Architects' Journal and construction products manufacturer Benchmark at a ceremony in Rotherham, is intended to celebrate the best new European building "built or designed in Britain". It was expected to go to Michael Hopkins's eye-catching east London Olympic venue, popularly known as "the Pringle". But Hadid's school triumphed with its bold approach to solving a difficult problem: how to bring four schools together on a small site under one "academy" umbrella. Evelyn Grace had to be squeezed into 1.4 hectares, while the average secondary school takes up more like 8ha. The school is also situated in the area of the capital with the highest crime rate in western Europe.
Rather than building the sort of glass atrium that has been adopted by many new schools, Hadid's team opted to spend the money on better-lit classrooms and corridors with more space. But her design does have one remarkable, central feature: a bright-red 100m sprint track running right through the site. There is also a multiuse Astroturf pitch, while another quiet corner is home to a wildflower garden.
RIBA president Angela Brady, who chaired the judges, said: "The Evelyn Grace academy is an exceptional example of what can be achieved when we invest carefully in a well-designed new school building. The result – a highly imaginative, exciting academy that shows the students, staff and local residents that they are valued – is what every school should and could be."
The school is run by the Ark (Absolute Return for Kids) Academy organisation, a charity set up by Arpad "Arki" Busson, the hedge-fund multimillionaire.
The final shortlist of the six rival structures competing for this year's award included not just Hopkins's velodrome, but Rab Bennetts's careful remodelling of the Royal Shakespeare and Swan Theatres in Stratford-on-Avon, an innovative cultural centre in Derry, the re-facing and transforming of a 1980s office building in north London, and the extension of the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany, by David Chipperfield Architects, who have also won the Stirling prize before. This was the first year previous entrants were eligible for consideration and all six shortlisted practices had been shortlisted before.
Full coverage of the prizegiving ceremony will be broadcast in a special edition of BBC2's Culture Show on Sunday.
Stirling prize: Zaha Hadid’s Brixton school beats Olympic velodrome
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
Evelyn Grace Academy wins the 16th RIBA Stirling prize, giving Hadid top award for second year running
Architect Zaha Hadid's Z-shaped school in Brixton, south London, has beaten the hot favourite, the Olympic velodrome, to win the 16th annual RIBA Stirling prize for architecture.
Victory for Evelyn Grace academy gives Hadid's practice a Stirling prize for the second year running, although it is the architect's first major building project in Britain. Last year her practice won for the Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome.
"Schools are among the first examples of architecture that everyone experiences and have a profound impact on all children as they grow up," said Hadid. "I am delighted that the Evelyn Grace academy has been so well received by all its students and staff."
The prestigious £20,000 award, handed over by the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Architects' Journal and construction products manufacturer Benchmark at a ceremony in Rotherham, is intended to celebrate the best new European building "built or designed in Britain". It was expected to go to Michael Hopkins's eye-catching east London Olympic venue, popularly known as "the Pringle". But Hadid's school triumphed with its bold approach to solving a difficult problem: how to bring four schools together on a small site under one "academy" umbrella. Evelyn Grace had to be squeezed into 1.4 hectares, while the average secondary school takes up more like 8ha. The school is also situated in the area of the capital with the highest crime rate in western Europe.
Rather than building the sort of glass atrium that has been adopted by many new schools, Hadid's team opted to spend the money on better-lit classrooms and corridors with more space. But her design does have one remarkable, central feature: a bright-red 100m sprint track running right through the site. There is also a multiuse Astroturf pitch, while another quiet corner is home to a wildflower garden.
RIBA president Angela Brady, who chaired the judges, said: "The Evelyn Grace academy is an exceptional example of what can be achieved when we invest carefully in a well-designed new school building. The result – a highly imaginative, exciting academy that shows the students, staff and local residents that they are valued – is what every school should and could be."
The school is run by the Ark (Absolute Return for Kids) Academy organisation, a charity set up by Arpad "Arki" Busson, the hedge-fund multimillionaire.
The final shortlist of the six rival structures competing for this year's award included not just Hopkins's velodrome, but Rab Bennetts's careful remodelling of the Royal Shakespeare and Swan Theatres in Stratford-on-Avon, an innovative cultural centre in Derry, the re-facing and transforming of a 1980s office building in north London, and the extension of the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany, by David Chipperfield Architects, who have also won the Stirling prize before. This was the first year previous entrants were eligible for consideration and all six shortlisted practices had been shortlisted before.
Full coverage of the prizegiving ceremony will be broadcast in a special edition of BBC2's Culture Show on Sunday.
Stirling prize 2011: a thrilling race through the shortlist – video
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 30, 2011
Jonathan Glancey rounds up the shortlist for the annual architecture prize, which this year ranges from the Olympic Velodrome in London to the Folkwang Museum in Germany
RIBA Manser Medal contenders up in the air
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 9, 2011
Shortlist for prize honouring best new private home in the UK has revealed a common quirk among cutting-edge architects
Those suffering from vertigo should look away now. The shortlist for the prize honouring the best new private home in the UK has revealed an increasingly common quirk among cutting-edge architects to go alongside the perennial fondness for floor-to-ceiling glass: rooms suspended in mid-air.
Two of the six contenders for the 2011 Manser Medal, organised annually by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), display this trick, known in the trade as cantilevering. One, Ty Hedfan in Brecon – the name means "hovering house" in Welsh – cunningly circumvents planning restrictions against building along the river bank which adjoins the plot by sending out a glass-walled spur to hang above the water's edge.
More dramatic still is the self-explanatory Balancing Barn in Suffolk, pictures of which resemble on first glance an optical illusion. At least half of the long, slim structure hangs precipitously over the edge of a steep, grass incline. It looks as if an escaped railway carriage has run out of track or, thanks to the shiny silver cladding, like a floating barrage balloon.
The barn, which is available for public rent, is "completely bonkers and very playful", said Tony Chapman, head of awards at RIBA and one of the five-strong judging panel. Most alarming, he said, is the glass floor inside the far-hanging edge: "It's so potentially unnerving for some people that they provide bits of carpet you can put over it, if you want."
The appeal for the judges of Ty Hedfan's cantilever was as much practical as aesthetic, Chapman said: "They weren't allowed to build on the river bank but there's nothing in the small print which says you can't build over the river bank. We like things like that, which get one over slightly on the planners."
The other four contenders are a varied bunch, albeit within a prevailing taste for generous glazing which blurs the boundaries between home and garden, and materials which seek to blend the building with the wider landscape.
There is one urban dwelling, not strictly speaking a new residence: a mid-century, brutalist home in Highgate, north London, remodelled to open the rooms out onto a secluded garden.
Another triumph against the planners is Watson House, an elegant glass-and-timber structure in the heart of the New Forest, which was only permitted on condition it was invisible from public sections of the woodland. The most modest home – a relative term within a selection with budgets starting at £500,000 – is New Mission Hall in Sussex, a pair of conjoined structures on the site of a Baptist chapel which offers a blank, brick facade from the road before opening out into a glassed rectangle at the rear.
The final contender, in the Surrey stockbroker belt of Epsom, most closely resembles the stereotypical notion of a modernist house, from its over 700 sq metres of living space and curtains of walled glass grand enough to satisfy the most demanding exhibitionist to its occupants who seemingly own little more than a few discreetly tasteful items of furniture and art, their toothbrushes presumably locked well out of view.
Inside, however, the design was clever enough to avoid severity, Chapman said, featuring touches like a cosy family TV room deep inside the interior. "You go in there and your first thought is, 'yes, this is an expensive, grand house'. But as you go round it you find lots of lovely little things that make it very intimate."
Overall, he said, the shortlist was perhaps the most diverse in the prize's 10-year history. The inclusion of the pair of cantilevered structures had not been planned. "Maybe subliminally we paired them off," he said. "But I don't think we did it deliberately."
While it would be "slightly arrogant" for RIBA to assume the prize had a direct influence on the wider design of housing, Chapman said, the hope was it might provide food for thought.
"The whole point of the medal, I think, is to try and improve the standard of all housing. We would like to think that there were things that fed into social housing in Hackney as well as the next rich person's house in Surrey.
"The standard of housebuilding in this country is not great. In fact it's pretty poor. It would be good if we could even just inspire clients to ask for things they might not have otherwise considered."
The winner will be announced at a ceremony on 10 November.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 22, 2011
The Balancing Barn would have livened up the rather drab Stirling shortlist. Oh well, at least there's the Carbuncle Cup to look forward to
The Olympic Velodrome, by Hopkins Architects, is a handsome building, taut and intelligent in its detail. Delivered on time and on budget, it has lightness, flair and a sense of contained drama, beneath a doubly-curving roof that some irresponsible critics have compared to a giant Pringle. It stands out from a drab-ish list of contenders for this year's Stirling prize, and is the bookmakers' favourite. There's just one problem: it has yet to perform the task for which it was designed, which is to hold Olympic cycling events before capacity crowds. So it's hard to say that it is a truly successful piece of architecture. It's a bit like a bike that's never been ridden.
The Stirling list would be less drab had it included MVRDV's Balancing Barn, a silver beam of a house projected into mid-air and built for Alain de Botton's Living Architecture holiday homes project. Then there's the Wales Institute of Sustainable Education by Pat Borer and David Lea, a work of ingenuity and rammed earth in an old slate quarry. Its inclusion would have been an opportunity to recognise architects outside the London orbit of fashion and schmoozery.
Instead, the list includes works by Zaha Hadid and David Chipperfield – both once slighted by the Stirling but now regulars – and Bennetts Associates' efficient but not very exciting Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. There is also AHMM's remodelling of an old office building in Islington. All are decent buildings, but the balance, as too often with the Stirling, is conservative and predictable.
If the velodrome is up for the prize a year too early, then a deserving winner might be O'Donnell and Tuomey's An Gaeláras cultural centre in Derry, which (though I confess it is the one work on the list I haven't seen) looks to be a robust, well-wrought and fitting sequence of spaces. Then again, the same architects might be contenders for next year's prize with their more substantial Lyric Theatre in Belfast; it might seem excessive if they won it two years running. Then again (again), they never worried about Norman Foster winning more than once, and maybe architecture, like golf, is something at which Northern Ireland is getting good.
Meanwhile, the Stirling prize's evil twin, Building Design magazine's Carbuncle Cup, is also announcing its shortlist. This award honours the country's worst building and there are some who say that it is unduly negative to pillory individual works in this way. Arguably so, but it is not half so negative to point out bad architecture as it is to put it up in the first place.
I am uninfluenced in this judgment by the fact that, with other critics, I will be an (unpaid) juror for the cup this year. I cannot possibly give an advance indication of our deliberations – mostly because I don't know what they will be – but I am struck by the poignant fact that one of this year's contenders, 3XN's new Museum of Liverpool, is a short distance from the 2009 winner, the Pier Head Terminal, and that both are in the middle of a Unesco World Heritage Site (you can read more about all this in Sunday's Observer). Equally poignant is the inclusion of Rogers Stirk Harbour's One Hyde Park, given that the practice was supported by London's former mayor on the grounds of its supposedly world-class design.
Stirling prize shortlist reflects new austerity in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 21, 2011
Two buildings on the Riba shortlist have been retrofitted to save money and energy, rather than built from scratch
A 1980s office block and a 1930s theatre are in the running to be named best new building of the year, as architects turn to retrofitting to save money and energy.
The Angel building in Islington, London, which BT vacated before the financial crash, has been shortlisted for the Stirling prize after a £72m refit. The 1932 Royal Shakespeare Theatre, which has been overhauled at a cost of £60m, has also been nominated.
The Royal Institute of British Architects' (Riba) annual £20,000 award has never been won by a refurbished building but the presence on the shortlist of two refit projects represents the emergence of austerity architecture.
New buildings commissioned before the public spending squeeze also made the shortlist, including the sweeping velodrome for the 2012 Olympics designed by Hopkins Architects, and one of the most expensive city academy schools ever built, the £38m Evelyn Grace Academy in Lambeth by Zaha Hadid Architects.
The velodrome is the first major Olympic venue to be completed and is favourite to win with odds of 2/1 at William Hill.
The Royal Shakespeare Company originally planned to demolish its 1932 listed home in Stratford-upon-Avon, designed by Elisabeth Scott, and replace it with a futuristic building by the Dutch architect Erick van Egerat.
The plan was revised amid cost concerns and local objections. Instead the RSC hired Bennetts Associates to slot a new thrust stage into the main auditorium, redesign the public areas and erect a viewing tower.
As well as saving money and reducing emissions, the refurb "captured the spirits and ghosts of the theatre", said Rab Bennetts, the architect.
The Angel building was stripped back to its concrete frame and reclad as a speculative office block, shaving almost 15% off the cost of a new building and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by about a third, the designer said.
"Refurbishment saves money and reduces the environmental impact of construction," said Simon Allford. "It also shows that we should be paying more attention when we design new buildings to ensuring they are capable of being adapted for future uses which we can't yet imagine."
This month Peter Rees, chief planner for the City of London, claimed there would be fewer new skyscrapers in the current economic climate and that applications to refurbish existing office blocks had increased. He said refurbishment projects were often cheaper, more environmentally friendly and provoked fewer objections than new buildings.
"My prognosis is there will be fewer towers and that's no bad thing," he told Building magazine. "There's a lot of late- [19]80s buildings that we shouldn't be throwing away."
Also on the Stirling shortlist is An Gaelaras, an Irish language arts and cultural centre in Derry, designed by O'Donnell and Tuomey Architects. It is the first publicly funded facility of its kind since the Anglo-Irish agreement.
The Folkwang art gallery in Essen, Germany, designed by former Stirling prize winner David Chipperfield, completes the line-up."Creative redevelopment is a strong theme in this year's list, with a major museum extension, a remodelled theatre complex and the innovative retrofit of an old office building featured, showing how even with tight planning and building constraints, talent and imagination can totally transform existing structures and sites," said Ruth Reed, president of the RIBA.
The selection of Hadid's academy highlights an ongoing row between architects and the education secretary, Michael Gove, who scrapped a major schools building programme and complained that architects were "creaming off cash" from contracts.
Architects reacted angrily to the claim, saying the high cost of the £55bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme was down to wasteful procurement rather than their fees. In February Gove renewed his attack, telling a conference on free schools: "We won't be getting Richard Rogers to design your school, we won't be getting any award-winning architects to design it, because no one in this room is here to make architects richer."
In June the Conservatives claimed architects and landscape architects had received £98m in fees to build 113 schools under BSF, with the biggest single fee being £2.7m. The Department for Education said it wanted to see more standardisation in school design to cut costs, sparking fresh concern at Riba.
The winner of the Stirling prize will be announced on 2 October.
Stirling prize 2011 shortlist – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 21, 2011
From a 1980s office block to Zaha Hadid's bank-busting academy, we take a look at the six spectacular buildings competing for RIBA's annual award
Stirling prize shortlist: big names stop the judges in their tracks
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 20, 2011
The six architects on the Stirling prize shortlist 2011 have all been there before. But could a political dark horse say 'on your bike' to the bookies' Olympic favourite?
It's never worthwhile to reduce the Stirling prize shortlist to some overriding theme, but having said that, there is one thing that unites this year's six architects: they've all been shortlisted before. Some of them several times – this is Zaha Hadid's fourth building, and David Chipperfield's seventh, which puts him in joint second place in the Stirling prize league table alongside Richard Rogers, with Norman Foster just one ahead. Does this suggest there were clear frontrunners in the Stirling race, or that a big name counts for more and smaller practices don't get a look-in?
Anyway, on with the reckless speculation. The traditional Stirling winner is a large public building, but in the current cash-strapped construction environment, there have been few of these to trumpet.
Which makes the absence of two of the main buildings on the London Olympics site conspicuous. No plaudits for the main stadium by US-based architects Populous – understandable in a way since its brief was practically to be as bog standard as possible – at which it succeeds (having a silly name for your practice doesn't help either).
And nothing for Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre – also understandable given its troubled history of redesigns, budget increases, temporary "water wings" imposed on it, and the fact that, er, it still isn't finished.
That leaves Michael Hopkins's Velodrome with the podium all to itself. As expected, it's currently the bookies' favourite and deservedly so. It's a handsome, unfussy building, quietly distinctive (enough to earn it a nickname: "the Pringle") and engineered as efficiently as a track bicycle. It's already had the thumbs-up from the Team GB cyclists, too, who described it as "the best in the world".
Looking at the other contenders, laudable though they are, they're not necessarily game-changing. AHMM's Angel Building reconfigures a 1980s office building with Louis Kahn-style barefaced concrete and a sheen of Mad Men mid-century glamour – very nice but perhaps too conventional to win. Bennetts Associates' Royal Shakespeare Theatre makes new sense of a messy accumulation of older buildings, but it's not a scene-stealer like the Tate Modern. Zaha's Evelyn Grace Academy is a consolation for the Aquatics Centre, and proof that her swooshing parametricism can work within tight budgets and design guidelines (is that Z-shape a touch of covert branding?). The fact that Zaha won the prize last year could hamper her chances, though. Likewise David Chipperfield's Museum Folkwang extension in Essen, another refined, sharp-edged German culture house for his collection.
Chipperfield already won with one of these in 2007, the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, and was shortlisted for another, the Neues Museum, last year. Perhaps he should design a Museum of German Museum Designs.
That leaves a dark horse: An Gaeláras by Dublin-based O'Donnell & Tuomey in Derry, Northern Ireland. It is the first purpose-built Irish-language cultural centre in the UK, a product of the Good Friday agreement, and thus freighted with political relevance (there hasn't been much of that in Stirling world since the Scottish parliament won in 2005). But it's also a beautiful design on a hostile site. Despite being walled in on three sides, it boasts a sculptural four-storey atrium criss-crossed by stairs and galleries, smartly mixing colours and materials – the type of space that stops you in your tracks. Uplifting and finely crafted, it could well tick all the boxes.
Hadid’s dynamic but disciplined school provides a lesson for Gove
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
The Evelyn Grace Academy in south London is a worthy winner of the Stirling prize, says Rowan Moore
The choice of Evelyn Grace academy has a political ring to it. At a time when Michael Gove, and his cheerleader Toby Young, are denouncing architects for robbing the public, and denying that good design has anything to do with good education, here is a prize for a school of extreme architectural ambition.
Confusingly for Gove and Young, the school's principal, Peter Walker, has established a regime of discipline and order – neat uniforms, long school days, mobile phone bans – of the kind that they might be expected to like. It is also partly funded by Ark, the charity founded by hedge fund manager Arpad Busson. In other words, its money comes from the same sort of place as much of the Tory party's funding.
The main contribution of Zaha Hadid's architecture to the school ethos is to create an energetic, if sometimes forbidding, atmosphere. It announces that the school is a serious place, not somewhere to slouch into. The design also responds to Walker's requirements for its internal arrangements.
It is not a completely perfect fit: Hadid's dynamic style is in theory more about freedom than order, and there are some crunching details where her demanding geometry encounters the budgetary and technical constraints of state school building. Nor, in straitened times, is it a model of school building that can be repeated too often. Sarah Wigglesworth's Sandal Magna school in Wakefield, which should have been shortlisted but wasn't, is a better example of how to do a lot with a little.
The Olympic velodrome was the bookmakers' favourite and, apart from the fact that it is not yet in full use, I would have agreed with them. The velodrome achieves a better match of concept, detail and purpose. But the academy is an extraordinary achievement, and there have been far dumber choices in the history of the prize.
Rowan Moore is the Observer's architecture critic
Architecture, Art and design, Awards and prizes, Comment, Culture, Stirling prize, The Observer, UK news, Zaha Hadid
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