It’s the twentieth anniversary of the RIBA Stirling Prize – awarded annually to the best building – so the judges could, perhaps, be forgiven a modicum of nostalgia.
The winner, the Burntwood School in Wandsworth, south London, by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, has much to recommend it, from the preservation of the existing “campus” feel, so important to the students and teachers, to the provision of classrooms flooded with daylight, to the way the construction schedule was designed to minimise the impact on school life. But it feels like a throwback to an earlier age: not just of the Blair government’s Building Schools for the Future programme, scrapped in 2010, which delivered many mediocre structures and only a few gems – Burntwood is the final flourish of this scheme – but farther still, to the unfortunate concrete public buildings of the sixties and seventies, with their interesting windows and unimaginative rectangular blocks.
There were better and worse buildings on the six-strong shortlist this year. The people’s favourite, according to a poll conducted by the BBC, was The Whitworth, Manchester, by Muma Architects, and it is hard to argue. Two new wings of glass and brick and steel are a welcome addition to the late 19th century factory-like solidity of the existing structure, opening the museum up to light and parkland and people.
The simple Maggie’s Centre, in Lanarkshire, Scotland, designed by Reiach and Hall Architects, offers a more subtle fulfilment of the brief than previous iterations by star architects and better creates a calming environment for cancer sufferers. Darbishire Place, in east London, by Niall McLaughlin Architects, also shuns the showy in favour of the very good, and offers some of the best social housing in the capital whilst remaining entirely sympathetic to the local area. Is it likely to excite the imaginations of budding future architects? Perhaps not, but few buildings on the list would. There was nothing truly revolutionary under consideration this year.
At the other end of the scale, the Stockwell Street Building, in Greenwich, by Heneghan Peng, hunkers down opposite the gothic beauty of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St Alfege Church as if embarrassed by its own bulk. The judges described it in geological terms – cliff-like, possessed of a “tectonic sensibility”, whatever that means - as if that in itself were complimentary. Well, coprolites are geological too. And it’s a selfish building. Views across the road to the Hawksmoor are maximised at the expense of any aesthetic appeal from the pavement below. It’s for people inside to look out from.
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Finally, there’s a throwback to a dystopian future. NEO Bankside, by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, seems determined to reinvigorate the “High Tech” movement all on its own, with its muscular external steel skeleton and bright colouring. It’s a temple to the overseas investor, and will provide nothing more than a home from home for money generated in the BRIC economies. It has been justifiably and widely criticised for its uncompromising attitude to public space and the way its developers minimised their responsibility to build affordable housing in return for planning consent. By comparison, a slightly anachronistic school seems positively saintly.