Posts Tagged Awards and prizes
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 17, 2011
A week of high-flying British architecture with the launch of Apple's Norman Foster-designed headquarters, the revised Chelsea Barracks plan and an eyecatching east London folly
While everyone was salivating over the launch of Apple's iCloud last week, Steve Jobs's other product launch garnered less attention. This was Apple's colossal new headquarters building in Cupertino, California – a gigantic white UFO sitting in 150 acres of landscaped parkland, designed for 12,000 workers. For obvious reasons, it has already been dubbed the "mothership". Nor has its designer been widely publicised, but we can reveal it's good old Norman Foster – who else?
Foster's people wouldn't reveal any details, but there are some in this video of Jobs presenting the scheme to Cupertino City Council, where it was received just as rapturously as a new iPad. "We do have a shot at building the best office building in the world," Jobs tells the awestruck councillors. "I really do think architecture students will come here to see this."
So what about the design? Foster has obviously taken a leaf out of Apple's chief designer Jonathan Ive's book – sorry, iPad. It looks like the circular trackpad of a giant iPod. If you run around the building very quickly, does a giant playlist light up in the sky? Mind you, by the time it's finished in 2015, it could look out of date.
The purity of the four-storey doughnut's impact on the landscape is also slightly compromised, it emerges, by other buildings on the site, including a four-storey car park. But none of the councillors seem to raise any objections; they're too busy geeking out their celebrity guest. "The word spectacular would be an understatement," grovels one of them, Mr Smithers-style. Just to drive the point home, Jobs mentions that Apple is the largest taxpayer in Cupertino, and hints that if he doesn't get his way, Apple will take their business elsewhere. Presumably the whole building will be able to take off and land in New Mexico, or something.
More good news for Foster and other British architects at this year's spurious but intriguing Best Tall Building awards. Foster's 80-storey Dubai tower, known as The Index – an energy-efficient, Italian futurist-looking affair – won in the Middle East and Africa category. Wilkinson Eyre won the Asia award for their colossal but elegant Guangzhou International Finance Centre – all 103 storeys of it. And Anglo-German architects Sauerbruch Hutton won the Europe award for their tasteful, low-energy Frankfurt office building, KfW Westarkade. The other winner was Frank Gehry's stunning Eight Spruce Street, a shimmering, steel-clad skyscraper that looks better than anything we're likely to find on the nearby World Trade Centre site. Though it does go by the pretentious name New York by Gehry, which makes it sound uncomfortably like a perfume.
Richard Rogers probably wishes he'd had Apple-style planning meetings over the Chelsea Barracks redevelopment in London. Instead, his design was controversially rejected when Prince Charles threw a royal spanner in the works last year, complaining about that vulgar hi-techie stuff to the Qatari royals.
No surprise that the revised design for the £3bn scheme is expected to be approved by Westminster council today, although the Qatari developers are said to be trying to reduce the amount of affordable housing in the scheme. No surprise, either, that the new plan, by Squire and Partners, Dixon Jones and landscape architect Kim Wilkie, is considerably more "traditional", laid out around London squares. Whoever designs the actual buildings will have to adhere to a preordained design code, which insists they "work in sympathy with surrounding character areas and architectural types without resorting to pastiche". Apparently Prince Charles is pleased.
After all this high-flying power architecture, we finally come right down to earth – to a little spot underneath a motorway flyover in east London. Here, a delightful temporary structure is under construction called Folly for a Flyover, as part of this year's Create festival. As designers Assemble explain, it's almost a stage set of a building, with curtain walls of wooden "bricks" made from salvaged timber, hung from scaffolding and held in place by cords running through the bricks. The pitched roof of the folly will poke out between the two roadways, and next to it are steps that serve as an outdoor seating area.
Not only is the folly ingenious and low-impact, it poetically turns a patch of dead urban space into a living venue. As the romantic engraving suggests, it's intended to feel like a forgotten piece of architecture which existed long before they built the A12 over the top of it – a building with a fictional history. Assemble, a collective of young designers and artists, were also behind last year's Cineroleum, a temporary cinema in a disused petrol station in Clerkenwell. This serves a similar function: it'll be a bar/cafe during the day, and in the evening you'll be able to watch films and performances on city themes, while traffic rumbles overhead, the Olympic building site bustles nearby and barges chug past on the canal. Sounds like the quintessential London summer experience.
RIBA awards 2011: the winners – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 18, 2011
Selected shots from the annual RIBA awards, celebrating the best in British architecture around the world
Light is right at the Brit Insurance Design awards 2011 – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 17, 2011
Once, we thought small was the future. But the standout objects in this year's awards have all gone the way of weightlessness
The shortlist for Britain's top design award has just gone on show at the Design Museum. What ingenious or world-changing object will capture the zeitgeist this year, I asked myself as I strolled through. Last year I was one of the judges and we awarded the prize to a folding plug by an unknown student. It felt like a good decision. No famous designers, no grand narratives. It was a vote for the small and perfectly formed, for the overlooked, for the everyday.
The shortlist feels weaker this year, and I'm not saying that because I'm not on the panel. For one thing, there's less of the social and political engagement that has become the hallmark of the design of the year award. Previous years have seen it go to a laptop for children in the developing world and the Obama "Hope" poster. And while those may have been crowd-pleasers, there were entries last year forcing bankers to confront the cost of food in Bangladesh or highlighting inflation in Zimbabwe. This show falls back on the idea of design as refined objects – as stuff. On those terms, the question is which ones stand out in this land of plenty.
Any prize that aims to collect the best across the varied fields of design – from architecture to furniture, from graphic design to transport – presents its judges with an unenviable task. It feels arbitrary pitting a Renault concept car against a new edition of Tristram Shandy. Neither does it make for the most coherent exhibition. What is inspiring about this annual snapshot approach, however, is the sense it offers of watching the design world evolve. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, our material environment gets better, smarter and lighter.
Especially lighter. In the 80s and 90s, everyone thought that the future was tiny. Led by the Japanese, we assumed our electronic appliances would miniaturise until we had cameras the size of wine gums. Today, we seem to be more preoccupied with lightness. New superlight materials such as carbon fibre – of which the exhibition's delicate display system is made – allow designers to achieve seemingly impossible feats. As a material property, lightness is not just elegant, it's more sustainable. The show features no category for something called "sustainability" – a good thing because, as I wrote recently, this should be a prerequisite of all design, not an add-on label. It was certainly the more mercurial ones to which I was drawn. And so if this year's judges find themselves furrowing their brows about the task ahead, perhaps they should simply choose the lightest.
But which will the judges really go for? Let's start with the heaviest of the disciplines – architecture. The judges may quickly find themselves down to two candidates: Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and Thomas Heatherwick's wildly popular UK Pavilion from last year's Shanghai Expo. There is no social imperative here. Both are frivolous pieces of national branding, and yet both have the capacity to leave the viewer awestruck. I'm certain the judges will opt for Heatherwick to top this category, as this is not the moment to be celebrating a boom-and-bust white elephant like the Burj. However, a less orthodox and virtually weightless choice would be a series of experimental structures by the Croatian-Austrian collective Numen/For Use, which look like a silken cocoon or cobweb. You can imagine them as sci-fi architectural parasites strung buoyantly between the skyscrapers of a Miss Haversham city, its rigid glass and steel gradually returning to the chaos of nature. Of course, one hopes that it would be made of something a bit more sophisticated than sticky tape.
How about the furniture category? Will the judges be seduced by an office chair inspired by a suspension bridge, designed by the ubiquitous Yves Béhar, or a beautifully turned wooden chair by Industrial Facility? I found myself captivated, again, by the light choice – a featherweight stool by recent Royal College of Art graduate Seongyong Lee. Lee created an entirely new material by laminating wood veneer to produce a lighter, stronger and much more beautiful version of cardboard. Picking it up, it's as though the stool is full of helium. It's not just that he's created a perfect archetypal object, but a material that feels almost immaterial, and that can be used to make anything from tables to pavilions.
The only object in the exhibition that stands out as a potential overall winner is in the product design category: the iPad. So successful has this game-changing piece of technology been that it should have its own category – indeed it pretty much does, since most of the entries in the interactive design section are apps for the iPad, displayed on iPads. But it's possible that the judges will avoid the obvious, popular, zeitgeisty choice and stick it to Apple – especially since one of the judges confessed, to me, "I don't like the internet". I rather liked Ingo Maurer's Flying Future hanging light, a diaphanous membrane inserted with organic LEDs (OLEDs). So energy efficient that they last almost indefinitely, these films of organic semiconductor are the light source of the future. They hold the potential for light to be treated as a material in itself, like cloth, draped as luminous surfaces.
With the relentless march of digital technology, the graphic design section of the show seems to be retreating into a world of nostalgia. It is wonderful to see the beauty of printed books reasserted, though I wondered why so many of those here are new editions of 18th- and 19th-century novels. Ironically, the work that jumps out here does so because it's miniscule (and, yes, light): Irma Boom's Boom. The most respected book designer in the world has produced a 704-page catalogue raisonné of her work, but it's just two inches high. One doesn't see that kind of modesty often. Or perhaps it's not modesty at all, but mystical devotion to her craft. The book is reminiscent of one of those medieval miniature Qur'ans written with a horse's hair.
Of all the disciplines, lightness is most a virtue when it comes to transport. For all the talk of electric cars and high-speed rail, we are realising now that only by reducing the weight of our modes of transport so that they consume less energy can we make them more sustainable. Here, there's another clear winner: an aluminium bicycle by Dutch brand Vanmoof. I'll take it any day over the YikeBike, an electric penny-farthing that could have been designed by HR Giger and appears, like some Sinclair C5 of bikes, to be dead on arrival.
The fashion category is anyone's guess. There's a reason why the Design Museum calls on an international panel of experts to nominate all the entries, and that's because design is a bewilderingly broad field and no one's an expert on all of it. As a show, it's hit and miss and there may be no agenda, but I recommend you go and see it. There's bound to be something there that will surprise you.
Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2011 award nominations – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 18, 2011
From energy-harvesting paving slabs to quick-assembly emergency shelters, see the projects at the cutting edge of design in 2010
Hadid’s design edges out Ashmolean to win the Stirling prize
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 5, 2010
Judges praise 'structural pyrotechnics' of Maxxi national art museum in Rome
Architect Zaha Hadid's striking design for Maxxi, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome, last night won the £20,000 Riba Stirling prize 2010, beating competition from contenders including Oxford's revamped Ashmolean Museum and a primary school in Clapham, south London.
The award, which is in its 15th year and is made in association with the Architects' Journal and Benchmark, was presented at a ceremony in the Roundhouse in north London. It acknowledges the feisty spirit of Zaha Hadid Architects' new structure in Italy, which resembles a series of jutting concrete and glass boxes.
The award, the judges said, marks the British-Iraqi architect's years of radical work, much of which has stayed on the drawing board.
"This is a mature piece of architecture, the distillation of years of experimentation, only a fraction of which ever got built," they said. "It is the quintessence of Zaha's constant attempt to create a landscape as a series of cavernous spaces drawn with a free, roving line. The resulting piece, rather than prescribing routes, gives the visitor a sense of exploration. It is perhaps her best work to date."
Hadid's work has been nominated for the award on three previous occasions, in 2005, 2006 and 2008, but this is the first time she has won.
While remarkable for its "structural pyrotechnics", the judges noted the building was actually organised into five main areas, all lit naturally through a system of controllable skylights, louvres and beams that "create uplifting spaces".
"Maxxi is described as a building for the staging of art, and whilst provocative at many levels, this project shows a calmness that belies the complexities of its form and organisation," added the judging panel, which this year included lay members Lisa Jardine, the historian and writer, and Mark Lawson, the arts broadcaster.
While the museum in Rome was the bookies' favourite to win, Rick Mather's Ashmolean refurbishment decisively won the public vote last week in a poll conducted by members of the Royal Institute of British Architects and the general public.
The Oxford museum earned 43.3% of the popular vote, while David Chipperfield's Neues Museum in Berlin came in a poor second with 24.1%. Hadid's building in Rome was the third most popular, with de Rijke Marsh Morgan's Clapham Manor Primary School coming in fourth, with 9.5%.
Other contenders for the prize this year were Theis and Khan's Bateman's Row and DSDHA's Christ's College school in Guildford.
Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi was the right choice for the Stirling prize | Jonathan Glancey
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 4, 2010
This stunning Rome museum is just the kind of project the Stirling prize should celebrate. Shame it could never have been built in Britain
So Zaha Hadid's Maxxi, a museum of 21st-century art in Rome has won the 2010 Stirling prize , the £20,000 award made annually for the best building designed by a British architect completed in the course of the current year. The Maxxi was in competition for the Stirling prize with the restored Neues Museum, Berlin, by David Chipperfield, and the freshly extended Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, by Rick Mather. Other competitors, although these could in no way be compared in terms of building type, cost or ambition to this trio of major arts projects, were two thoughtful south-eastern schools, in Guildford and Clapham, and a block of flats in London EC2. The public vote was for the Ashmolean.
Without doubt, Hadid's win raises the award's profile. It needs the glister of genuinely imaginative architects. Whether or not Hadid needs the Stirling prize is another question, although you tend to think she still relishes recognition in a country that has not exactly done her a lot of professional favours. In 1995, her scheme for an eye-opening opera house for Cardiff Bay that might have set the tone for a very special development of this Welsh seascape, was turned down in favour of the banal sweep of buildings there today.
Not everyone agrees with the final decision. The online community, at least as represented by readers of Building Design magazine, had already begun to savage Hadid before Saturday night was over. It sends out the wrong messages to architectural students, commented one, at a time when they should be aspiring to design schools; another, responding to the story of Hadid's struggle to win recognition in Britain, snapped: "If she really had talent, it wouldn't have been a struggle." Ouch.
But my view is that Maxxi is a captivating building. Within its serpentine halls and unexpected galleries, the visitor with an open mind can find unselfconscious references to the works of such baroque masters as Guarino Guarini, echoes of Rome's Spanish Steps and its Piazza del Popolo, as well as references to futurist paintings, sudden blasts from the Soviet constructivism of the early 1920s, as well as something of the dunescapes of southern Iraq that so captured the imagination of the young Hadid. And it could never have been built in Britain, because it has been designed and built over a long haul, for functions that have yet to emerge, and for unembarrassed delight.
No, Maxxi isn't a model for new primary schools in London. What it offers instead is an adventure in and through architecture. Criticise it all you like, but what Hadid's latest venture in Rome does is raise the stakes for the Stirling.
London’s Strata tower wins Carbuncle Cup as Britain’s ugliest new building
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 12, 2010
The 42-storey building in Elephant & Castle was nominated for its 'plain visual grotesqueness' and 'Philishave stylings'
It was hailed a breakthrough in urban wind power: a 42-storey tower with built-in turbines to deliver 8% of its electricity needs. But today the Strata tower in south London found itself becalmed when it was named Britain's ugliest new building, pipping a rival that the judges said resembled a giant pair of buttocks and a bus station that looked like a jelly mould.
Justin Black, the director of the developer Brookfield had already admitted: "It's what I term Marmite architecture – you either love it or you hate it." And sure enough the judges of the Carbuncle Cup, architecture's least sought after prize, opted for the latter.
"Decked out with Philishave stylings, this is a building that appears to be auditioning for a supporting role in a James Bond title sequence," said Ellis Woodman of Building Design, the trade newspaper which organised the prize.
The building was nominated by The Georgian Group for its "plain visual grotesqueness". Adam Jones, another nominator, said: "I used to live in south London and moved partly because — and I'm not joking — the Strata tower made me feel ill and I had to see it every day."
The dubious honour, now in its fifth year, is intended as an antidote to the Royal Institute of British Architect's Stirling Prize for the best building and has attracted growing levels of interest. Design critic Stephen Bayley said it "attracts a far higher level of intelligent participation than the Stirling prize".
Thirty-one buildings were nominated by readers "united in their often poetic expressions of outrage", said Woodman. The shortlisted Cube office development in Birmingham was described by its nominator as like "a lumpy beige ornament your father buys your mother for her birthday because he thinks it's classy, whereas she can see it for the tat it is".
For the winner, there was the difficult question of how to react. Robert Torday, the marketing director of the apparently unamused architects of the scheme, BFLS, declined to comment.
And not everyone is sure the award is a good thing.
"Labelling one architect with having produced the worst building of the year without mention of the client, developer or contractor means giving the architect a massive kicking when they are very rarely the sole author of the project," said Charles Holland, director of FAT Architecture. "Nothing wrong with robust criticism, but laughing at other people's mistakes is never an edifying spectacle."
RIBA awards gold stars to educational buildings
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 24, 2010
Fifth of RIBA's annual architecture plaudits go to education projects – but now cuts will bite
In what may be the last hurrah for public buildings before government spending cuts bite, prizes for architectural quality were awarded to 17 new school and university buildings by the Royal Institute of British Architects today.
From a £27m art and design academy at Liverpool John Moores University to a multicoloured glass extension at Clapham Manor primary school, education buildings won almost a fifth of the RIBA's 93 awards in a feat that may not be repeated for a generation after the government ordered a moratorium on new plans for school buildings.
The new education secretary, Michael Gove, recently clashed with architects when he accused them of "creaming off cash" that should have been going to the frontline.
The RIBA roll of honour also reveals the damaging effect of recession on architectural opportunity: instead of the stadium, airport and museum projects of previous years, the 2010 list features more modest projects, including a bus drivers' toilet in Dagenham and a black-clad electricity sub-station on a 2012 Olympic site in east London. And, with house building falling to an 87-year low, just three housing schemes were granted awards.
Many of the country's leading designers, including Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield and Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, won accolades for buildings elsewhere in the EU rather than at home. Hadid's expressionist angles and curves were reserved for Rome's museum of 21st-century art, MAXXI, while Lord Rogers, widely regarded as one of the world's leading modernists, designed a new headquarters campus for a Spanish technology company in Seville.
"The RIBA awards reflect not only the state of British architecture but also that of its economy," said Ruth Reed, the institute's president. "In the midst of the deepest recession in the awards' 45-year history, this year demonstrates that, although times might be hard for architects, there are still great buildings being built throughout the country and overseas. The RIBA awards always give an opportunity for gem-like small projects and less established practices to shine through, and this year is no exception. Far from being a size prize, the RIBA awards are for buildings that offer value to people's lives."
The memorial in Hyde Park to the victims of the 7 July 2005 bomb attacks on the London transport network, by Carmody Groarke, also won and is considered by some as a possible contender for the shortlist for the £20,000 Stirling prize for building of the year, which is drawn from the RIBA award winners.
Ellis Woodman, architecture critic at the newspaper Building Design, said that other strong Stirling prize contenders included the Nottingham contemporary arts centre, the new British embassy in Warsaw, the Neues Museum in Berlin, Christ's College school in Guildford and Hadid's MAXXI museum.
The Oregon-born architect Rick Mather won most awards, gaining four. Other winning buildings included a new home in Bristol for Wallace and Gromit's creators, Aardman Animations, and a cluster of foil-clad small-business units, which look like cybermen helmets, designed by Thomas Heatherwick, in Wales.
Schools, museums and public loo: 2010 RIBA architecture awards unveiled
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 20, 2010
Schools triumph in the architecture industry's annual awards – as does a bus drivers' toilet in Dagenham
Run-of-the-mill? Not Britain’s best new house
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 16, 2010
Hunsett Mill on the Norfolk Broads has been extended into a RIBA award-winning home that is surprising and playful
With a change of wind demanding work with the sails and a tight bend on the River Ant calling for my full weight on the tiller, I very nearly missed the award-winning new extension to Hunsett Mill when I sailed past it this summer. I could see the mill itself alright – a handsome brick structure with restored sails dating from 1860, as well as the old mill keeper's cottage. Thousands of people have done the same; this picturesque site has been the stuff of souvenir postcards from the sepia and Edwardian to the New Elizabethan and lurid colour.
The extension – an architectural tail wagging a Victorian dog – is all but invisible. This is just as things should be; this renovated and greatly extended building, newly awarded the RIBA Manser Medal for the best new house in the UK, has been designed in the guise of a sequence of shadows to the existing house.
The Manser Medal, created by the architect Michael Manser in 2001 – himself no stranger to innovative houses in rural settings – exists to encourage intelligent one-off homes, many of these medal winners designed by young, and youngish, architects who have since got into their creative and professional stride like Jamie Fobert (Anderson House, London W1), Mole Architects (Black House, Ely, Cambridgeshire) and Alison Brooks Architects (Salt House, St Lawrence Bay, Essex).
So that it doesn't impinge on a much-loved Norfolk view, the new extension at Hunsett Mill is hidden from sight from the river until the very last moment. When it does hove into view, what an extraordinary thing it is – like a house made from singed and folded paper with cardboard cut-out gables and big windows snipped from the walls as if by a child with a pair of nursery scissors. It's certainly an eye-catcher, but a friendly, cartoon-like creation that borrows both from local timber building traditions, and (I couldn't help thinking) from Peppa Pig.
It's certainly a surprising and playful structure that adds to the medley of 19th-century cottage, mill and houseboat here in Britain's most watery National Park. Designed by the amusingly named, and London-based, Acme architects, whose website features a number of adventurous, if as yet unbuilt, housing projects, Hunsett Mill has been described by the judges of the 2010 Manser Medal as "more akin to a piece of art than a piece of rural, domestic architecture".
Luckily, you can decide for yourself: the five-bedroom mill has been rebuilt and extended as a house to let for up to 11 adults and children. Idiosyncratic and well-crafted, this new building will grow into a long established landscape of oddball buildings, and boats and birds of every shape, size, age and colour. It's modern in the sense of its bare, open-plan interiors, yet traditional with its gables and timber construction. It is very rare indeed for such a strong architectural statement to be so deferential to its setting, and yet alive with its own special character.
Most cleverly of all, Hunsett Mill gives the appearance of being accessible only by water. This is certainly the best way to see it, or to come and stay. By road, the entry through Stalham village, bisected by the A149, passes by a wholly inappropriate Tesco superstore (who gave this planning permission?) that's likely to double in size. From the tiller of a passing wherry, though, the scene from the River Ant remains a delight – new architecture and all.
Architecture, Art and design, Awards and prizes, Comment, Culture, guardian.co.uk
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