One of the BBC's "Public Purposes" (4c) under its Royal Charter is "stimulating creativity and cultural excellence". As part of this each year it joins with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) to cover their annual Sterling Prize which is presented "to the architects of the building that has made the greatest contribution to the evolution of architecture over the past year". Tonight the 2014 winner will be announced live in a special show on the BBC News channel.
The six finalists have been publicized over the past few weeks and an on-line poll run for the public's favorite. The poll tends to be more of a beauty contest than the RIBA considerations but the associated segments on the BBC in the run-up stimulate thoughts and discussion about modern architecture.
So which is your favorite?
The "public face" of the buildings run from traditional red brick to glass curtain walls. Only one is a completely commercially funded building. Beyond the orange cloud are the six finalists.
(The first video embed codes are originally BBC produced, they may be geo-blocked but the titles are links that might work instead. I have also included the RIBA's YouTube videos. The blockquotes are taken from the relevant RIBA page unless otherwise linked.)
1. New Central Library, Birmingham.
This was the favorite in the BBC poll. Sometimes describes as looking like a jewel box, the exterior design of conjoined circles evoke engineering and jewellery, two of the city's traditional industries. Brummies, like Londoners often give nicknames to structures. The complex Gravelly Hill interchange between two major freeways and local road is called "Spaghetti Junction" and a female statue in a fountain, officially "The River" in another central square is affectionately known as the "Floozie in the jacuzzi".
Playing an important role in Birmingham’s Centenary Square, the new Library of Birmingham is an impressive and bold addition to the city, a truly public and civic building. It has set a precedent for the scale of the buildings on the square, which helps to animate the place and stipulate a sense of enclosure. For the city, this is a significant public sector investment, which has not only provided a new integrated public library but also helped to regenerate the city’s cultural heart and helped link the Westside to the city core.
Its intriguing section connects the building’s internal atrium to the square outside, creating a number of levels where users can enjoy the spaces. The journey through the building reveals itself through an interlocking atrium, tying together a range of volumes and providing glimpses of natural light.
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2. The London Aquatics Centre
This is part of the London 2012 Olympics legacy so you may wonder why it is being considered for the 2014 prize. For the Games, two large temporary wings were added to accommodate spectators. These have now been removed and glass walls replace the revealing the building in all its glory. It is now a municipal swimming pool used by local schools and residents.
The concept was inspired by the fluid geometry of water in motion, creating spaces and a surrounding environment in sympathy with the river landscape of the Olympic Park. An undulating roof sweeps up from the ground like a wave folding over the building, defining the separate practice and performance-cum-diving pool halls. The main hall, with its acoustically treated timber ceiling, allows for normal conversation across the screeches of delighted swimmers.
Despite the unusually stringent demand for the building to work as both an Olympic venue and, in its purer form, a public swimming pool, the resulting Centre has proved successful in both scenarios. There were exceptionally complex site constraints: it was tightly bounded by a main railway line to the east, the Waterworks River to the west and underground power lines running the length of the site.
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3. Everyman Theatre, Liverpool
Commissioned by the charitable trust that runs Liverpool's theatres, its designers are Harworth Tomkins who also worked on the Young Vic and Royal Court in London. 90% of the original building was recycled into the new build.
Everything has been thought about over and over and the right decisions reached. The tour de force is the first floor bar, a piano nobile stretching across the front of the building. Tucked in behind is a nook of a writer’s room with the air of a gentlemen’s club. The auditorium, with its burnt orange upholstery, is a clever cross between Matcham and the cosy cinema feel of the original.
The old theatre, converted from a 19th Century chapel on one of the city’s most important streets, was one of the most cherished of Liverpool’s cultural assets. It was though totally unsuited for productions and audiences in the 21st century. Consequently, the challenge to build a new purpose-built theatre on the site of the original was a brave but key move by the client team.
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Haworth Tompkins have created a building that instinctively you want to reach out and touch; its handrails, walls and exquisite purpose-built joinery are all equally tactile. The concrete is good but never precious. However none of the elements shouts out, together they simply add to the whole, amplifying this exceptional piece of architecture.
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4.London School of Economics Saw Swee Hock Student Centre
This building had to use a complex site in a medieval road plan. It also had to respect the surrounding buildings and their users. The design allows light to permeate into the centre and to the locality. It is notable for the craftsmanship involved in its building.
The architects started by taking the geometry of tight angles as the definition of a solid into which they gouged cuts and cracks that give light and form. Every angled facet responds to rights of lights of its neighbours. The momentum is generated in the surrounding streets and drawn into the spiral that rises through the whole height of the structure as a continuous internal street, taking the form of a generous stair that clambers its way around the core. Outer walls slope and twist, floors take up complex non-orthogonal shapes, yet all the accommodation generated seems to be natural, functional and hugely enjoyable to use. The result is truly unexpected. It is fascinating to see a practice enlarging its areas of expertise in this way.
The bold red brick tower is made of not just any brick - there are 46 standard shape bricks, 127 special bricks out of a total of 175,000, and not a single cut brick. This is achieved with walls that slope and become perforate to give shading and have angles that vary in every direction all suggesting a very considerable imaginative control. The latticing lets in more light, lending it a Kahnian air. The windows use jatoba, a self-finished hardwood from Brazil and have a complexity of their own whereby many verticals are gathered together next to larger panes, the verticals indicating opening lights.
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5. London Bridge Tower (AKA The Shard)
This is my tip for the RIBA prize winner. Not only it it a dramatic and significant addition to the London skyline, its construction involved building both up and down from ground level at the same time in order to complete this within the time scale needed for its commercial developers.
It joins other nicknamed London buildings like "The Gherkin", officially 30 St Mary Axe. Also under construction are the "Walkie-talkie", 20 Fenchurch Street and the "Cheese grater", 122 Leadenhall Street. Modernist architecture is often thought to be a series of square glass boxes like the Canary Wharf tower or 1 Canada Square. Or architects shove a broken pediment on top of a box and call it post-modern like the Sony Tower in New York. Like the LSE Student Centre, the usually shaped buildings are a response to the sites which correspond to ancient street patterns. They also have to accommodate building regulations that require sight lines from outside the city to significant buildings, especially St Paul's Cathedral.
To make a tower on such a tight site a thing of great beauty is a rare achievement. The architects have added immeasurably to its immediate environs and to London as a whole. Like the Gherkin, this is a tower that people who don’t generally care for modern architecture seem to like. It makes people talk about architecture, which can only be a good thing. But there is much for architects to admire too: the way it meets the split ground level expressing its structure all the way; the way you keep seeing the structure from the inside of the building and the way the structure shines when it frames the views from the uppermost public platforms.
There cannot be a more compressed, nor exemplary, model for city intensification than this tower: 1.2 million square feet of accommodation built on a tiny parcel of land directly next to one of London's major transport hubs. It has six uses each occupying multiple floors: health clinic, offices, restaurants, hotel, residential apartments and public viewing gallery: a genuine vertical village. All this touches the ground effortlessly with offices and viewing gallery, the high-volume uses, approached directly from a podium facing London Bridge Station, and the rest from street level on the opposite side.
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6. Manchester School of Art
Perhaps the most classic "glass box" exterior of all the finalists, despite its arts and crafts style sign, it is the interior space of this building that is perhaps the most significant reason for its inclusion in the shortlist.
The welcoming ‘vertical gallery’ space is open to all, enabling students and visitors to perambulate up gently rising flying staircases. Behind the vertical element sits the ‘design shed’ where open studios, workshops and teaching spaces provide a wide range of spaces for learning. The discreet security systems allow students to access studios without the need for endless turnstile systems that often plague such buildings. Large custom-made hangar doors enable the ‘shed’ to open up to the public vertical space for exhibitions or other events.
They are one of a number of innovative design solutions that have been cleverly incorporated throughout the scheme. Client and Vice Chancellor Professor John Brooks has written, ‘Arts and culture have a vital role in the education of our young people and in the values of society. At a time when financial pressures can dominate decision making, it is vital that we have been able to take a long-term view about the critical importance of the Arts to our well-being and the stability of our society.’ This refreshing refusal either to bend down before the totem art for art’s sake or to accept that the decent provision for the arts is a luxury we can no longer afford has led to a great building.
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