Three university buildings, two of them commissioned by Oxford, will go head to head with Damien Hirst’s art gallery, a controversial estate regeneration project and a stealthy concrete house worthy of a Welsh Bond villain, in the battle to win the RIBA Stirling prize for the UK’s best new building.
The two contenders from the city of dreaming spires couldn’t be more different, from the outside at least. One is the gleaming glass wedding cake of the Blavatnik School of Government, by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, a slick beacon of good governance with a whiff of oligarch bling – perhaps in homage to its funder, Len Blavatnik.
The other is the Weston Library, a reworking of Giles Gilbert Scott’s 1940s New Bodleian Library by Wilkinson Eyre, who have scooped out the congested innards of the old hulk and inserted a light and airy world of new book stacks and reading rooms behind the tough masonry walls.
While their wrappers might be different, the interiors have much in common, sharing the contemporary default language of blond wood, a lot of glazing and large central gathering spaces of somewhat uncertain use.
The third university project is a world away, set on the banks of the Clyde, providing smart pinstripe homes for the faculties of nautical studies and building, engineering and energy of the City of Glasgow College, along with a 200-room hall of residence. Designed by Michael Laird and Reiach and Hall Architects, it might seem unremarkable at first glance, but it’s one of the few recent projects in the city that actually acknowledges the river, using the buildings to frame two handsome new civic spaces.
The space in between buildings is just as important to Trafalgar Place, a development of 235 homes by dRMM Architects, the first completed phase of the Heygate Estate regeneration in Elephant and Castle. It’s questionable whether the wider transformation of a public housing estate into a private enclave should be celebrated, but the architects have done a fine job of crafting something that is beginning to feel like a real place, with well-scaled streets and spaces and facades of polychromatic brickwork.
A similar sensitivity to the sequencing of spaces is found in an immaculate new residence on the edge of Wales, designed by Penarth-based practice Loyn & Co for a retired artist couple – the first private house to grace the Stirling shortlist for 15 years. Featuring luscious expanses of exposed concrete, this bunker-like dwelling is cleverly submerged into its hillside site, with living and working areas arranged around top-lit courtyards.
It has an attention to detail and material finish only matched by Caruso St John’s Newport Street Gallery in Vauxhall, for Damien Hirst. Housed in a series of Victorian scenery painting workshops, joined by a new brick extension with a saw-tooth roof, it is a model of joining old and new, and features two of London’s most beautiful staircases.
Tasked with the perennial ordeal of comparing apples and oranges, this year the judges’ challenge is as difficult as ever. Remembering that the prize is specifically for the building that has made “the biggest contribution to the evolution of architecture”, Herzog and de Meuron’s virtuoso stack of glass cylinders should take the gong – although the judges might be deterred by the fact that the Swiss maestros will almost certainly win it for their Tate Modern extension next year.
The full shortlist
Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford by Herzog and de Meuron
Squaring up against the sober classical portico of Oxford University Press across the road, the Blavatnik School can seem like brassy arrival to the city of honey-coloured stone. But the longer you look, the more carefully judged it appears to be. Stepping back from the street, its proportions rhyme with its neighbours, the wafer-thin concrete slabs hover between delicate glass leaves, while its spiralling interior is one of the most uplifting spaces built in Oxford in a century.
Odds: 3/1
City of Glasgow College, Riverside Campus by Michael Laird Architects, Reiach and Hall Architects
Dressed in a curtain wall of gold anodised aluminium, composed with a smart Miesian air, these two fine towers frame a (sadly gated) square, creating a new space on the river Clyde, fringed with a public colonnade along the riverside. As well as the usual teaching spaces, a seven-story grand hall brings a sense of status, while a thrilling simulation suite transports you to the bridge of a container ship chugging along the Hudson.
Odds: 4/1
Newport Street Gallery, Vauxhall, London by Caruso St John Architects
A surprisingly grownup building for the self-styled art world prankster, Damien Hirst’s new gallery is a finely tuned addition to this backstreet site. Retaining a quasi-industrial character, and fronting the railway arches with a sheer brick wall, it gives little away from the outside. Its light-flooded interiors provide a good variety of exhibition spaces, linked by delightful ovoid stairwells built from deliciously buttery brick.
Odds: 9/2
Outhouse, Gloucestershire by Loyn & Co Architects
Consecutive winner of the Welsh Gold Medal for the last two years, for two similarly spectacular residences, Loyn & Co have once again crafted a seductive, minimalist lair in a rural setting. Considered “out of context with the protected landscape” by the local planners, it nonetheless convinced the planning committee with its stealthy profile, hidden beneath a field, with courtyards scooped out of the plan, keeping the memory of ruined stone buildings on the site.
Odds: 5/1
Trafalgar Place, Elephant and Castle, London by dRMM Architects
A complex of eight buildings, ranging from four to 10 storeys, with a mixture of mini-towers, apartment blocks and town houses, the development continues the surrounding street grain, and uses eight different shades of brick to echo its varied neighbours. But the controversy around this estate regeneration continues: Southwark should gain from a profit-share agreement, but a Freedom of Information Act request recently found they are not due to receive a penny from this first phase.
Odds: 4/1
Weston Library, University of Oxford by Wilkinson Eyre
Past winners of the Stirling prize for their Magna centre in Rotherham in 2001, Wilkinson Eyre have again breathed new life into an existing structure – this time not an industrial shed, but Giles Gilbert Scott’s Grade II-listed library. Their clever surgery gives a new public face to the building, while opening up the interior with a “floating stack” and a glazed mezzanine, allowing visitors to see the special collections library in use.
Odds: 7/2
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