Posts Tagged Stirling prize
Olympic velodrome in race for building of the year prize
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 18, 2011
The London 2012 Olympic velodrome, nicknamed the giant Pringle, has been put in the long list by RIBA for the Stirling prize
The velodrome for the 2012 Olympics, nicknamed the giant Pringle for its crisp-like curves, is in the running to be named building of the year after picking up a design award from the Royal Institute of British Architects.
The 6,000-seat building, completed in February, is the first construction at the £9bn Olympic park in east London to be granted an award by RIBA.
The creators, Hopkins Architects, were advised by Sir Chris Hoy, the multiple gold-medal winning track cyclist, and the award looks set to be the first of many for the park. The 80,000-seat main stadium has already been applauded for its simplicity, and, meanwhile, the aquatics centre, designed by Zaha Hadid, is still being built, and a giant viewing-platform, designed by Anish Kappor to resemble a twisted roller-coaster, is halfway to completion.
The RIBA's long list, for contenders for the £20,000 prestigious Stirling prize, includes the velodrome, a project led by Sir Michael Hopkins, who designed Portcullis House in Westminster.
On the list of 97 buildings granted RIBA awards is the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, refurbished and rebuilt by Bennetts Associates; the Evelyn Grace city academy in Lambeth, London, designed by Hadid; and the Faustiono winery in the Ribero del Duero region in Spain, designed by Foster and Partners.
An elegant but austere pavilion cafe, designed by Caruso St John Architects, in the grounds of Chiswick House, the 18th-century neo-Palladian villa in west London, is one of the smallest projects but is being tipped by some for a place on the RIBA shortlist.
The president of the institute, Ruth Reed, said the list illustrated the health of British architecture in spite of the recession hitting construction. In August 2009 about 30% of architects were without jobs or enough work to keep busy, according to the institute, and about 4,000 architects were made redundant.
"In spite of a terrible worldwide recession many exceptional buildings have been and continue to be built in the UK and overseas," said Reed. "Even in constrained times committed clients working with talented architects can achieve architectural excellence."
However, so thin have the opportunities been in the UK that some of British architecture's biggest names only won prizes for projects in Europe. Last year's Stirling Prize winner, David Chipperfield, won awards for a shopping centre in Innsbruck and a museum in Essen, but nothing for a building in the UK.
The legacy of Labour's education building programme continued to be rewarded with 14 schools and nine university buildings granted awards.
An architectural experiment by the writer Alain de Botton was recognised, with prizes for two private holiday homes he commissioned and which he lets through his group, Living Architecture.
One of the homes is a tar-black house with a concrete and wood interior designed by the Glasgow firm Nord Architecture and set on the shingle beach of Dungeness, in Kent, near the home of the late film-maker Derek Jarman. The second is a balancing barn in Suffolk, by the Dutch practice MVRDV, which cantilevers unnervingly off a hillside. The homes offer people the chance to experience cutting-edge architecture – though a week in the balancing barn in September costs £2,604.
James Stirling: visionary architect, and a very naughty boy
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 20, 2011
Tate Britain reappraises James Stirling – who gave his name to Britain's premier architectural prize – and shows he could be good, and bad… but never dull
Did the great British architect James Stirling kill architecture in Great Britain? The question has to be asked since, as well as being an original and internationally admired talent, who is sometimes said to be the Francis Bacon of British architecture, he also designed some of the most notoriously malfunctioning buildings of modern times. Worse, two of these buildings were in the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, wherein opinion formers spent their formative years. If you want to annoy as much of the establishment as possible, there are few more effective ways than this.
In particular he and his partner James Gowan designed the history faculty and library at Cambridge, completed in 1968. Here, as they struggled to study in this alternately freezing/boiling greenhouse, with dodgy acoustics, frequent leaks and falling cladding tiles, future columnists and editors incubated a deep loathing of the building, of Stirling, and by extension all forms of ambitious modern architecture. In the 1970s the young critic Gavin Stamp made his name with a remorseless hatchet job on the history faculty. In the 1980s it narrowly escaped demolition.
In 1984 the pro-Stirling critic Reyner Banham wrote that "anyone will know who keeps up with the English highbrow weeklies (professional, intellectual or satirical), the only approvable attitude to James Stirling is one of sustained execration and open or veiled accusations of incompetence."
Behind most broadsheet tirades against modern architecture in the last 40 years stands the figure of James Stirling. And, when architects are now subjected to the most elaborate forms of control and project management, squeezing out invention in the interests of reducing risk, it is in order to avoid mishaps much like the Cambridge history faculty. Stirling was seen as the very type of the award-winning architect whose buildings don't work. He was, to boot, arrogant, lecherous and sometimes boorish. At a party in the apartment of the New York architect Paul Rudolph, he chose to express himself by urinating against its huge window, from the terrace outside, facing into the crowd of guests.
Yet he continues to hold an honoured place. The Stirling prize, inaugurated shortly after his death in 1992, is named after him. Now, as the wheel of fashion grinds inevitably round, his work is up for reappraisal. Next month Tate Britain will honour him with an exhibition based on the impressive archive of his work owned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture. These drawings will reveal him as a more subtle, complex and even charming character. They are skilful, sometimes refined, sometimes informal. Some drawings, composed as presentation pieces after a design was complete, have an abstract elegance. At other times he would cover sheets of writing paper, diary pages and the backs of plane tickets and telegrams with thickets of sketches, as he worked ideas over and over. They might be plans, diagrams or three-dimensional views. They have energy, with much-repeated lines or brisk hatching or Klee-like arrows scurrying through them.
They are signs of thinking with his hands, of trying things out, of exploring and excavating. These are not the disdainful doodles that some architects dash off, hoping that it will be taken as a sign of genius that they can be done so thoughtlessly. They show complete faith that the design of buildings is a serious business, to be pursued with time, testing, consideration and debate. He might try several versions of an elevation, with differences that would not be obvious to a casual observer.
They also show faith that architecture is something like music or painting or literature, that it is something to be composed, with tensions and harmonies to be resolved within its overall structure. Stirling kept considering his art in relation to that of others, both 20th-century figures like Le Corbusier and the Russian constructivists, and architects of the Italian renaissance, or the grand industrial architecture of Liverpool, where he grew up. His designs and drawings set up multiple dialogues with other works. And, like artists and writers, he wanted to be provocative. He wanted to wake people up.
These tensions and elaborations, these interplays of forces and allusions, should make it hard to dismiss his work as mere leaky showmanship. His Florey building for Queen's College Oxford is a sort of inhabited viaduct turned into theatrical U-shaped court, a distant derivation of the Oxford quad, facing the river Cherwell. It is Oxonian and constructivist at once. It is perverse but you would have to be a dullard not to see its drama. Students there now comment on its faults but also on the atmosphere generated by this extraordinary hemi-cauldron.
His later work is more likeable and less leaky, as Stirling became slightly less reckless, and as he started building in Germany, where the building industry seemed better equipped to realise his ambitious ideas. His 1984 Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, for example, was one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country, on account of the force of the building. In this it was a prototype of the Guggenheim in Bilbao.
At its centre is a great circular stone court, like an inside-out mausoleum or a new-built ruin, with vines falling down its walls. A system of ramps takes you through the building, as if you were climbing a hillside and, at the moments when it might become too monumental, bright curves of steel and glass lighten the mood. It is romantic, potent and playful at once, and perfectly captures the balance between monumentality and motion, between eternity and perambulation, which is the essence of museums.
The Staatsgalerie wouldn't work without the pushing and pulling of ideas you can see in the drawings. It is worked and wrought in a way few buildings are nowadays. Architects still work hard, and test different ideas, but they search more for a magic formula in the cladding or the form which will make the whole building smoothly beautiful and consistent. There is less sense that a building is composed like a painting, and that the architect should leave some of his sweat and brushmarks on the canvas. Stirling's drawings bring on a nostalgia for a way of designing – among other things, without a computer in sight – that has gone the way of dodos and drafting boards.
Does his art justify the malfunctions? There is, to be sure, more than one side to the argument: Stirling's defenders always said that his projects were victims of poor construction, cost-cutting and clumsy clients. It can also be said that time casts a rosy glow over the faults of more distant architects. The shoddiness of Nash, the impracticality of Vanbrugh and the budget-busting of many great architects in history are now almost forgotten and forgiven. The same will probably happen to Stirling.
Stirling was a very naughty boy. The pleasures of his successes came at an exorbitant cost, not only in technical failures but also artistic ideas that didn't quite come off. The number of his works that are unequivocally admirable are few. Architects are mostly more careful and responsible now, which is mostly a good thing. But, at his best, Stirling showed what powerful and moving things buildings can be, and the world would have been poorer without him.
Rowan Moore’s best buildings of 2010
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 13, 2010
The Observer's critic was impressed by Zaha Hadid's Maxxi and saddened by the loss of Hastings pier
2010 was the year of the pop-up. The idea had been growing for a while: enterprising young architects and students building short-lived cafes and lidos in neglected locations. This year, business and PR cottoned on. Pop-ups popped up everywhere, selling watches, healthy drinks, art, and yet more watches. A pop-up restaurant was built on the roof of the future Westfield Stratford City shopping mall, to make the place look less corporate. There will be pop-up Tescos at this rate.
In 2011, in other words, the idea will seem chewed-up and overworked, but the best of this year's crop was Cineroleum, an ex-petrol station turned into a temporary cinema in Clerkenwell, London. This preserved the pioneer spirit of the pop-up and provided the year's best spatial experience: at the end of each show the curtains enclosing the seating would rise, and the audience would find themselves watching the street.
Part of the charm of the pop-up is the distraction it provides from the darker, more confusing world of big permanent buildings. Here we find London skyscrapers, conceived in the boom, rising from the ground as if everything was just fine: the concrete core of Renzo Piano's Shard, going up above London Bridge station, is now Britain's tallest building. Elsewhere, things are less cheery: regeneration projects stalled, new home building stagnant. The quality of what is built or proposed is miserable.
The coalition government has added to the confusion by ripping up existing planning structures in the name of localism, without putting anything very convincing in its place. The likely outcome is paralysis, punctuated with some very big mistakes. The government, depressingly, chose to blame the wrong people for the extravagance of schools built under Labour's monstrous private finance initiative. Rather than the financiers and consultants who are ripping off the state, they went for architects, usually the most conscientious and worst-rewarded of the people involved.
In other news, Herzog and de Meuron designed the world's finest car park, at 1111 Lincoln Road Miami. Zaha Hadid's magnificent Maxxi, or museum of 21st-century art, opened in Rome and won her the Stirling prize. Thomas Heatherwick designed an extraordinary spiky thing at the Shanghai Expo. Tragedy of the year was the burning of Hastings pier.
The turkey of the year was Jean Nouvel's Serpentine Pavilion in London. It didn't seem to have much a concept, except to be very red, and was shoddy in detail and execution. Apart from that, it was fine.
TOP 10
Cineroleum London. Best of the pop-ups. A cinema in a petrol station
1111 Lincoln Road Miami. World's finest car park, by Herzog and de Meuron
Maxxi Rome Zaha Hadid's tour de force, winner of the Stirling prize
Venice Architecture Biennale Kazuyo Sejima's vast and engaging exhibition of architecture
Wales Institute for Sustainable Education Machynlleth. Environmental architecture done right
Balancing Barn Suffolk. MVRDV's anti-gravity holiday home
South London Gallery Subtle remaking of existing buildings by 6a Architects
Café, Chiswick House London. Caruso St John show how to be classical but not kitsch
Evelyn Grace Academy Brixton, London. Magnificent, if forbidding, school by Zaha Hadid.
Studio East Dining Westfield Stratford City, London. Pop-up restaurant with Olympic view by Carmody Groarke
TURKEY
Serpentine Pavilion Very, very red, a bit pointless and distinctly shoddy
Zaha Hadid: ‘I’m happy to be on the outside’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 9, 2010
Zaha Hadid's spectacular buildings were once dismissed as the work of a fantasist. Last week she won the Stirling prize. But despite the belated recognition she says she will never be a schmoozer
The maid comes down to let me in. She's small, middle-aged and apologetic. "Sorry, sorry, the bell's not working," she says, and whizzes us to the penthouse flat in silence. When the lift doors open I think I'm having an attack of snow blindness. The whitest whiteness everywhere – white floors, white walls, white ceilings, white fibreglass sculptures that double up as white sofas. At the far end of the room, I can just about make out a vision in crow-black and oversized sunglasses sitting behind a huge white desk. Nobody ever said Zaha Hadid was a regular girl. Today, she's wearing black arm stockings, an upside-down Issey Miyake jacket that's got a touch of the tarpaulin about it, black leggings and black wet-look booties. Her hair is hennaed reddy browny black. Hadid is 60. Only she could pull it off.
This is where she lives in Clerkenwell, east London, though it might as well be her gallery. And of all the self-created installations on show she might be the most spectacular and complex. You could see her as the Queen of Hearts screaming, "Off with their heads", at insubordinate subjects – or as the Wife of Bath cackling lasciviously through her gap tooth. She is a fantastic monster, uncompromising dictator of her own wonderland, and one of the world's great architects. Time magazine named her the world's top thinker in its 2010 list of influential people. This really is her moment. After decades of being dismissed as a fantasist whose building designs are pie in the sky (or at least on the drawing board) she is finally seeing her visions realised. Last week she won the Stirling prize for her Maxxi art centre in Rome, next week sees the public opening of her school in Hackney, her wondrous wave of an aquatics centre will feature in the 2012 Olympics, and she is about to start her first building in her country of birth, Iraq.
I first met Hadid seven years ago at her studio, also in Clerkenwell. The studio was a former school – appropriate, because you could often see her young students shaking in her presence. Back then, she sat me in front of a video to show the projects she was working on – virtual presentations of buildings that might well never get made, including the Maxxi. They were swooping and swirling, fabulous and futuristic, locked into the landscape and landscapes in their own right. One building might resemble a delta or Scalextric track, the other a clifftop; her angles were all over the place as floors merged into walls into ceilings. She always wanted to break down barriers – whether between blue-collar and white-collar workers (so at the BMW plant in Germany, the cars constantly pass desk workers on a conveyor belt) or building and landscape, or the ancient and the modern. Rather than the huge phallic constructions beloved of so many male architects, hers tended towards the womb-like – meringues and oyster shells.
Her proposed buildings were gorgeous acts of the imagination. And little more. So what changed? She takes off her designer shades and slips into designer specs. "People's perception of architecture. Cities became more ambitious again. There was a tremendous interest in public building, and architecture became more in the forefront of the discourse. So many major projects were made into competitions and that opened it to the public. There was so much more knowledge and conversation about architecture." Plus, she says, she and her staff worked like fury. In 2003, there were about 70 workers in the same building. Now it's more like 250 (no surprise it's cramped for space) with another 150 dotted around the world. She talks quickly in a deep, croaky Zsa Zsa Gabor voice that suggests too many late nights and cigarettes (she's stopped smoking now).
One of the criticisms levelled at her work is that it is not always practical or people-friendly. Hadid's nadir was in 1995 when Cardiff rejected her futuristic opera house, despite the fact that she beat 268 rivals in a competition. The design was so radical that she was asked to submit again for a second round, which she again won. The opera house was ditched and Hadid was bitter. She claimed she was the victim of xenophobia, racism, misogyny, you name it – and she had a point. Rhodri Morgan said it looked like the Ka'bah in Mecca, and that if built it might incite a fatwa. After that, the work dried up for a few years. There were stories that her family would drive up in Rollers to hand her bundles of cash to keep the practice going. "I wish that was true. My family, my brother supported me. But it would have been seen as over-indulgent if they'd just carried on supporting me. In the office we really had to get our act together."
Did she think her work would never get made? "No. The reason I say no is because I made a decision in the mid-90s to not let it get to me. After Cardiff I decided I'm not just going to stop, and meow about it. It was very upsetting, but I knew I just had to carry on."
Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950. She was inspired by both parents – her father was socialist politician turned businessman, her mother taught her to draw. She grew up as a secular Muslim, attending convent school. In the Iraq of her teens, Muslims lived alongside Jews and Christians, the 1960s were in full flow, women were empowered and anything seemed possible. In her mid-teens, she went off to school in Switzerland, studied maths in Beirut and came to Britain to study architecture in 1971. She has been here ever since.
Astonishingly, the school in Hackney is her first permanent building in England (Maggie's cancer centre in Kirkcaldy was opened in 2006). Why has she struggled so much? Well, first there's been the argument about her work, which tends to focus on spectacle rather than the purely functional. Put simply, she always wants her buildings to look great rather than just do a job. "They should have an impact on the street life and they should draw people to them. They have to be interesting. I don't think everything should be the same and this obsession with sameness had to do with the industrial period of mass production and now we don't have to look at things like that."
Why did so many people think it was impossible for Hadid to realise her architectural dreams? "I don't think people believed in the fantastic. By the 1970s people had lost faith, and by the 1980s even more so with the whole postmodernity, and the idea that the city should remain as it always used to be. London still suffers from that to a degree."
But perhaps the bigger problem was Hadid herself. So many people didn't like her, thought she was too big for her booties, an outsider, an interloper in a male preserve. Who needed a mouthy diva in a world where men got by perfectly nicely, talking politely and shaking hands on the golf course?
Look, she says, times have moved on, female architects are accepted much more these days. Really? Where are the next generation of Zaha Hadids then? "They're there." Give me names, I say. "Ach, they're students."
She tells me she has loads of female students (and I've seen them at her office) but there is a practical problem with women. "Especially now they're liberated; they look after the home, they look after the children, they look after the work and with architecture I think it's important to have continuity. It's not like nine to five, you can't just switch on and off."
So has the world really changed that much, or has she simply become part of that establishment? (After all she was presented with a CBE by Prince Charles in 2002.) She smiles. "No, I'm not part of the network. I'm not saying I want to be on the outside, but if I'm left on the outside that's where I'll operate from. It's a nice place to be."
She has a lovely crooked smile, and despite her famous toughness and refusal to schmooze there is warmth. I could see her as an earth mother, but she has no children and lives alone in the flat. Has she made sacrifices to get where she has? "No, no." A second later she's changed her mind. "Of course it has an effect on your personal life. But it wasn't because 'I'm going to sacrifice everything to do this'. It's just the way it is."
Is there a man in her life? "No, no." Has there been one recently? "Well, not recently." Is she happy with that? "I don't think about it in this way. Things happen in life. Maybe there are people who are more strategic than I am."
When was the last time she had a boyfriend? "I can't talk about that. It's private. I can't." For once Hadid looks almost bashful. Does she think men are scared of her? "No I don't think so." Pause. "Well maybe some men are." She has a reputation for terrifying people. Did she deliberately create that image? "No I didn't create that. I'm very nice and very charming." And so she is. Today. But she's also known for saying things like "I don't do nice".
"They're not used to an opinionated woman. Men think a woman should not have an opinion. I think more so here than other places." She says British men have such a strange relationship with women – stunted, suspicious, primitive. Why? "They're scared of women. The relationship between men and women in Britain is not normalised. Never has been. I think it's part of the problem. I made a decision when I was in school that I'd have a lot of male friends. But you take a married guy here and he wants to have dinner with a friend who happens to be a woman, it is seen as horrifying. Maybe not so much in America. There are these tensions that aren't necessary." Now she's really warming to the subject. "It's very strange here. There are many other people in England who don't get work – very talented people like [architect] Nigel Coates. I don't think people can deal with unusual people. They're so used to the manner of solicitation as the way to move forward. People have become so used to the schmoozing, they think it's the way it has to be."
Has she ever played golf? "No." Just think how many buildings you could have got made if you'd got a set of clubs, I say. She grins through the gap tooth. "I realised many years ago that there's a certain world I can't enter. As a woman you're not accessible to every world."
She must be now that she's got such clout? "Well now because they know me. But even now I'm not going to go boating or golfing with my clients. All of these guys go powwowing. I was really staggered." And she's so staggered she pulls down her glasses. "I was invited to a lunch in New York City, and I was meeting VIPs, and I rang the bell and they told me what floor to go to and I arrive at the floor and this guy saw me and almost had an epileptic fit because women are not allowed on that floor. In New York! Women were not allowed on that floor!! That was two years ago. Isn't that staggering?"
She hears somebody coughing in the background. "Hey Roger!" She doesn't quite click her fingers. "I always guess where Roger is because he coughs." Roger, Hadid's charming publicist, appears. "Why are you in the toilet?" she asks. He points to his iPhone. "I'm sorry, I was just talking."
I ask if I can look round the rest of the apartment. Sure, she says. Her bedroom gives me another attack of snow blindness – huge white double bed, white blinds, white dressing table with dozens of perfume bottles shaped into their own skyline. In front of the bed is a big flat-screen telly and in the bathroom a huge mirror curved and cut like a land mass. "The only thing about this flat is there's no kitchen," she says. How can she live without a kitchen? "Well it did have one, but I took it away. It was ugly." Does she ever cook? "No, I used to have someone to cook, but he's gone now. I go out all the time."
What does she do to relax? "Relax?" Suddenly she seems rather foreign, as if she's not quite understood the question. "Relax? Nothing." But with buildings on site in France and Britain and Milan and Azerbaijan and Spain and China, there's not that much time for relaxing.
What did Prince Charles say to her when he presented her with the CBE? "He asked me if I practise in Britain." I burst out laughing.
"Really. You think that's funny? It is a funny place, Britain." Is it home? "It is. I like it actually." What does she like about it? "It's fuddy-duddy, it's grey." Maybe she wouldn't stand out as much elsewhere? "I don't know. I stood out in China. It's the way I am."
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.
The real iconic architecture | Irena Bauman
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2010
Instead of wasting time on glitzy competitions and prizes, why don't architects co-operate to create something truly radical?
The Riba Stirling prize will be awarded on Saturday and this year, even more so than in previous years, the shortlist is dominated by publicly funded museums. The very mention of this prize, like any other prize granted by a profession to itself, inspires a sinking feeling over the loving marriage between the architectural profession's gatekeepers and the media. And a baby Stirling prize contender is being conceived right now by that very union.
The shortlist of an international architectural competition to design a new outpost for Dundee has just been unveiled by the Victoria and Albert museum, which hopes to put the city on an international map with a single gesture. Such a glamorous process is bound to be popular – but the competition hype can only be challenged by commercial failure. The financial world is the only potential hurdle for the venture because international architectural competitions serve the master of commerce, albeit with a veneer of culture.
But there are no real baddies here. The client partnership means well: V&A is keen to spread the benefits of its collections to the people outside London and the benefits of creative tourism to the local economy; Dundee city council and Scottish Enterprise are doing their job of finding use for derelict land. But their "vision" is obtained almost free of charge from hundreds of professionals all over the world who are too dazzled by "iconic" architecture to question their own role in its creation – barely noticing that they work their guts out for low odds of success because they are driven by creativity, ambition and vanity . But they don't really mean any harm.
What is harmful is the waste of resources generated by the competition process, the commercial exploitation of talent, the lack of genuine grassroots involvement and the inability of the promoters to tell the truth about the sustainability of the project.
Truly iconic architecture, the "haute couture iconic", is generated under two conditions: the design is groundbreaking and its location is sufficiently attractive to support the new building. The Eiffel Tower, Tate Modern and the Sydney Opera House are good examples.
But there is another type – the "discount iconic" architecture that plagues smaller cities, stripped of any original design integrity through countless rounds of value engineering, in locations that struggle to generate footfall and are quickly surrounded by a heap of very poor private-sector developments, the pay-off for public investment in the building. Such is the fate of the Lowry Centre in Manchester and the Sage in Gateshead. Sometimes the icon closes soon after a fanfare opening, as was the fate of the American Culture Centre in Paris and the Museum of Popular Music in Sheffield.
The competition for the Dundee museum should ask the right question: is there a different route to the iconic that is more appropriate to our time? Could the V&A collection be housed in a shed and the rest of the funding invested in Dundee's creative entrepreneurs? Could the creativity wasted in competition be harnessed to work together with the local people and university partners, to devise a regeneration strategy that best builds on local skills, and social capital? Now that's what I would call iconic.
Architects build an ark as work dries up
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2010
De Rijke Marsh Morgan will seek out work in Belgium, Norway and the Netherlands on the barge, complete with design studio
When the economic storm came they were hit harder than any other profession, but architects are nothing if not ingenious. One of the UK's leading practices is building an "ark" to find work in more clement overseas markets as designers brace themselves for a fresh downturn.
De Rijke Marsh Morgan, which tomorrow hopes to scoop the £20,000 Stirling prize for the building of the year at a gala ceremony in London, is planning to send its staff, no doubt two-by-two, on to an industrial barge loaded with a fully-functioning design studio and office across the North Sea to Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands to take on new work. The 60-metre-long reconditioned Rhine barge is being fitted at a total cost of around £400,000 with a cargo-style container with room for 32 desks, a pair of meeting rooms, a model workshop and a covered exhibition space on the terrace.
It promises to fulfil a long-held architectural dream of the ultimate "loose fit" building, one which can move from site to site. But it comes amid the toughest trading period for British architects in a generation which has seen well over 1,000 designers laid off and practices of all sizes and reputations affected. The shortlist for tomorrow'sprize, for the best new European building built or designed in Britain, includes some of the most modest buildings ever to appear in the prize's history and a pair of favourites that were built in Rome and Berlin.
"It is about being light on our feet and responsive," said Alex de Rijke, founder of dRMM, who has designed "De Ark". "The UK is a difficult place to exist as an architect compared with other parts of the world. There are just too many architects all going for the same jobs and it is so hard to produce good architecture here that architects are going further afield because continental culture wants it more. If we have a serious job in a European city then we can take the office there and deliver it. The cities that are worth being in are always connected to water."
His practice's shortlisted entry for the Stirling prize, a south London primary school, was built before the latest public spending cuts and his firm has since seen commissions for schools and social housing cancelled following the election of the new government.
Such has been the impact of first the recession and then public spending cuts that the firm is among several on the shortlist that have struggled for work or been forced to make redundancies to survive over the past two years.
DSDHA, which is nominated for a secondary school in Guildford, has reduced its staff from 22 to 15, while Theis and Khan Architects, whose homes and offices development in east London is the only domestic architecture in the running, lost almost half of its staff. Even the best-established architects on the list have suffered. Zaha Hadid, the bookmakers' favourite with the MAXXI museum of 21st century art in Rome, saw profits almost halve in 2008/09.
"It has been very bad," said Rick Mather, who is shortlisted for his acclaimed reworking of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. "There weren't the long term projects coming in to sustain us. A lot more people are applying for work and there are terrible stories about some of the larger offices."
Indeed, Foster + Partners, which transformed the London skyline with City Hall and the Swiss Re tower, has reduced its workforce by 236 over the past two years and the gloom appears to be spreading again.
A monthly survey by the Royal Institute of British Architects has shown a steady decline in members' hopes for an increasing workload over the past six months, with less than a fifth of architects now expecting any improvement in their workload and a quarter claiming to be underworked.
There are signs of life in parts of the private property market as credit starts to flow from the banks again and architects who work for banks and financial institutions have reported a bonanza year.
Those less fortunate have tried to treat the slump as an opportunity for reflection after years of boom as banks poured money into housing developments, the Labour government pumped billions into the new schools programme and businesses burnished their images with ever more lavish headquarters. They hope the pause for thought will result in better future architecture.
Deborah Saunt, a director of DSDHA, has found the time to begin a PhD study into the work of her own practice. She said architects had suffered from a lack of time to analyse their work in the pre-credit-crunch boom because of the volume of work.
"There has been a move away from discourse [about architecture] in the UK," she said. "Because everyone was operating in a white hot economy, key questions haven't been asked. We were concerned about how you maintain quality and an interest in research at a time when production was taking over."
•The Stirling prize is on BBC2 tomorrow at 6.30pm.
Stirling 2010
David Chipperfield is one of the favourites to pick up his second Stirling prize tonight for the Neues Museum in Berlin, but told the Guardian: "My money's on Zaha." Iraqi-born Hadid, who is famous enough to be known by her first name, is hoping to win at her fourth attempt and William Hill has her MAXXI museum at 11-8 favourite.
However, Chipperfield, who won the £20,000 prize in 2007, thinks the judges should consider honouring one of the schools because it would be popular, "like cleaning ladies getting MBEs". That might sound patronising from someone who was knighted this year and wins international commissions that are the envy of a struggling profession, but Chipperfield reckons this year's shortlist is such a diverse mix that the judges should consider ruling out his building and Hadid's and choose from the remaining four instead. The panel, which includes the broadcaster Mark Lawson, the architect Ed Jones and Ruth Reed, the president of RIBA, may want to do just that as they try to compare the architectural achievement of two modest school buildings – Christ's College school in Guildford and Clapham Manor primary – a small block of flats in east London and a pair of giant European cultural institutions costing a combined €350m. Bridging the gap and perhaps therefore a possible winner is the refurbishment of the Ashmolean Museum, whose director, Dr Christopher Brown, has already described it as "one of the outstanding museum buildings of the 21st century".
Riba Stirling prize 2010 | Architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 24, 2010
The 2010 Riba Stirling shortlist is out and, as usual, the committee has missed some of the best candidates
There is a band of buildings, skilful and brave in their design, that will feature prominently in future histories of current architecture. Some are world famous, some are hugely popular, some represent new ideas surfacing for the first time. All share the same badge of honour. They did not win the £20,000 Riba Stirling prize, the award for "the architects of the building which has made the greatest contribution to British architecture in the past year".
These buildings include the Eden Project in Cornwall, Tate Modern, Selfridges in Birmingham, the New Art Gallery in Walsall, Will Alsop's Hotel du Department in Marseille, Zaha Hadid's Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg and her BMW Central Building in Leipzig. The British Library in St Pancras, London, should also have won: although unfashionable and controversial when it opened, its quality becomes more apparent with each passing year.
Meanwhile the prize has been awarded to projects that have since subsided into obscurity. These include the Magna Centre in Rotherham, whose victory in 2001 seemed to surprise even its architect, Chris Wilkinson. The prize has an instinct for the compromise candidate, for the one least likely to frighten any horses.
This year some exceptional buildings haven't even made the shortlist, announced last week. One is the Nottingham Contemporary Art Centre by Caruso St John, a building that responds professionally to a demanding brief, budget and site. It is the work of client and architects who are both good and committed. Its galleries are scrupulously designed for the display of art. It deals beautifully with sloping terrain, allowing internal and external public routes to run through it. More than that, it tries something unusual, which is to see how ornament can be used on a modern building. It is clad in pale green concrete panels imprinted with lace patterns, creating a play of apparent lightness and actual heaviness.
Idea is translated into material, which is something architects should do. Nottingham Contemporary stands outside the usual run of decent-but-predictable modern architecture of which there is plenty. It is a public, civic building that makes a contribution to its city. It is an opportunity to recognise buildings north of Watford, which is something Stirling juries sometimes worry about, but the opportunity was not taken.
The list also omits the British Embassy in Warsaw by Tony Fretton, who must wonder what he has done to upset the Stirling fairy. Last year Fretton was the victim of a bizarre and nasty press campaign, which complained that two of the five prize judges were predisposed in his favour. This overlooked the fact that the other three weren't, or that, year after year, the Stirling jury is loaded in favour of the established and middlebrow.
As it turned out, the supposedly biased jury didn't choose Fretton's shortlisted entry, the Fuglsang art museum in Denmark. Instead they opted for Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre in Hammersmith, London, by Richard Rogers's practice, Rogers Stirk Harbour. This is a nice building, but it wasn't pushing any boundaries to reward a small project by a 76-year-old already amply recognised.
Fretton is not an ingratiating architect. His plain buildings can look ordinary in photographs. Nor is he a slick minimalist. What's good about his work is the subtle relationships he creates between building, people, landscape and – when they are galleries – art. It is surely part of the job of prizes like the Stirling to draw attention to the un-obvious, the things whose qualities are easily overlooked.
Rather than Nottingham and Warsaw, the shortlist this year's prize includes two schools, and a house and studio built by an architect couple for themselves. All are good buildings, designed by lovely people, and it's possible that the jury wanted to send a message to the government by including the schools. Look, they seem to be saying to the school-axing Michael Gove, the design of places of learning does matter. But the house doesn't open up new ideas the way Nottingham does, or have its public importance, while the prize's role is to recognise the best architecture rather than send messages.
Also on the shortlist is the extended Ashmolean museum, Oxford, by Rick Mather Architects. This earns its place for the way it organises a complex array of galleries behind the museum's original, Grade I-listed building. But it displays a cloth ear for materials, structure and detail. Its glass and steel balustrades are in jarring shopping-mall moderne, and if the choice was between this and Nottingham, the latter should have won.
The good thing about this year's list is that it includes the two projects that were always the most likely and deserving winners, Zaha Hadid's MAXXI (Museum of 21st Century Arts) in Rome, and the Neues museum in Berlin by David Chipperfield with Julian Harrap. The latter is a beautifully poised, meticulous, but also creative shaping of a new museum out of the bombed-out ruin of an old one. It is a smash hit in its home city. It represents a way of doing architecture, where the signature of the architect is not always apparent, that breaks with the icon-building of recent years.
MAXXI is a Wagnerian blast from the brass section of the orchestra. It is the consummation of years of imagining and fighting for new ways of forming and arranging buildings. It has flaws, but it is a magnificent urban experience, a passeggiata played out on multiple intersecting levels. Hadid, the most famous woman architect in history, and possibly the most famous living British architect, has never been recognised by the Stirling. In Stirling-think, this would be a reason for giving her the prize.
To choose between these two is tough – Berlin just shades it for me – but if either wins the Stirling will break its habit of shirking the most powerful works. The thing to fear would be a split jury when the winner is chosen in October, with a third, compromise candidate surging through. Then the Stirling really would have lost all claim to be about the best architecture, as opposed to the smooth management of judging committees.
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.
Architecture, Art, Art and design, Awards and prizes, Comment, Culture, David Chipperfield, guardian.co.uk, Norman Foster, Olympic games 2012, Richard Rogers, Stirling prize, Zaha Hadid
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