Stirling Prize shortlist is not Britain's best, says William JR Curtis
- Published: 24 July 2008 13:10
- Last Updated: 24 July 2008 15:52
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The AJ asked the distinguished critic for his verdict on the Stirling Prize shortlist. He was not over-impressed. Read more Stirling coverage
The Stirling Prize is supposed to honour the building which has made 'the greatest contribution to British architecture over the past year'. In theory this could be a work designed by a British national for a site in a foreign land or by a foreigner for a site in Britain. In an era of globalised practice, territorial limits are becoming ever more blurred. Attempts to define a 'British architecture' are doomed to insularity and caricature. The most interesting buildings today have diverse historical and geographical origins. They respond to present-day realities while transforming principles from earlier modern architecture.
The shortlist for the Stirling Prize is drawn from the longer lists of the RIBA Awards. Like any process of selection, this one is open to the vagaries of taste, the transience of fashion and the passing pressures of the profession. There is always the risk that a good building may have been left out and a poor one retained. One needs to be on the lookout for works of substance which contribute to the long-term culture of architecture.
Architectural juries and prizes are quite capable of getting things wrong in ways that shock the status quo. In 1986, an Aga Khan Jury turned down Louis Kahn's magisterial Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, because it did not fit a transient ideological agenda (this 'vote against architecture' was put right later).
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| Missing out on prizes - Louis Khan's Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh |
Last year, I was a member of the Jury of the Equerre d'Argent in France. We selected a fine, restrained school in Bordeaux by the lesser-known architect Ballot and Franck, and all hell broke loose because the prize did not go to a star elected by the Parisian power and fashion system.
The Stirling Prize is there to reward architectural results, not politically correct agendas, and it is puzzling that the Westminster Academy, by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, is on the list at all.
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| Westminster Academy - too pedestrian for the shortlist? |
Organised as a stack of horizontal trays around a central atrium, this pedestrian work could as easily be a middle-grade office building as a school. Bands of colour and slogans in a dated graphic idiom are no substitute for inspiration. The BBC headquarters in Scotland by David Chipperfield (on the longlist) also uses an atrium but turns it into a cogent architectural idea, a stepped social landscape, which results in a more articulate work.
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| One that got away? Chipperfield's BBC Scotland |
There are no fixed conventions for the representation of institutions today, and the Manchester Civil Justice Centre by the Australian firm Denton Corker Marshall underlines the difficulty of finding an appropriate language for a key social function in the cityscape. The building overwhelms its setting with a collision of contrasting architectural genres, each well designed and made, but without a discernible meaning, hierarchy or order behind them.
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| Corporate behemoth - Manchester Civil Justice Centre |
The section ingeniously threads together courtrooms and corridors as
well as permitting natural cross-ventilation. Today, the magic word 'sustainability' is used to silence criticism, but it cannot
be allowed to excuse architectural clichés. Despite the neo-avant garde touches, this building comes across as a corporate behemoth, and as such conveys a bureaucratic idea of justice.
Would one really want to give the Stirling Prize to a 'restoration' job, in this case the rehabilitation of the Royal Festival Hall (1951) by Allies and Morrison? I scarcely think so, because it would signal a lack of confidence in today's architecture. While the architects have liberated whole areas of the lobbies by scraping out later accretions of offices, they have also altered the main hall in an unforgiveable way, removing the Aaltoesque ceiling elements that once flowed towards the stage. Maybe the acoustics are better, but it is hardly surprising that the Twentieth Century Society was upset. To honour this operation may risk setting a precedent for other problematic 'restorations' of key public buildings such as the National Theatre, a great Modern work, which has already suffered from ill-advised alterations.
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| Setting the wrong precedent - Royal Festival Hall |
Britain has a fine tradition of modern housing, and the Accordia project in Cambridge, by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, Alison Brooks Architects and Maccreanor Lavington, establishes a low-rise enclave of spatial richness and character. The project combines several kinds of public space and semi-public space with more sequestered courts. One recognises echoes of a Cambridge modern tradition in brick from the early 1960s, and the project sits comfortably between country and city.
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| Accordia sits comfortably between country and city |
Some of the contextual gestures, such as the abstracted chimney stacks, look almost stuck on, and the relationship of solid to void is not always decisive. Accordia relies on an intelligent transformation of past modern housing models (Utzon's Kingo Houses come to mind) but lacks the social challenge and formal tension of the originals. This is scarcely a reformist scheme, but it does suggest how the dreary suburb can be replaced by a habitat combining urbanity and nature.
The architecture of Zaha Hadid is involved in a restless spatial experimentation which sometimes results in extravagant formalism. Her projects are often generated from images that celebrate movement, and these are translated by computer into geometrical shapes of extreme complexity. The sequence of Alpine stations on the Nord Park railway rising up the slopes from Innsbruck, Austria, combines translucent glass canopies of complex curvature with lower regions in poured concrete. Hadid has been inspired by ice formations and frozen mountain streams.
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| Nord Park is seductive but the concrete areas seem fudged |
The project is quite seductive, especially when dramatised in Hélène Binet's photographs taken at night with the glass shapes lit up against a background of snow. But the concrete areas underneath seem fudged, while the positioning of the curved canopies over the bases is not always adroit in sculptural terms. Some doubts remain concerning the translation of concept and image into finished form and durable material.
Foreign observers used to refer to 'High Tech' as a British strain of Modern architecture, but it is now an international phenomenon, especially in transport buildings. The Bijlmer ArenA Station is a giant operation steered by two practices, Grimshaw and the Dutch firm Arcadis, and constitutes an entire rearrangement of urban infrastructure on the outskirts of Amsterdam. It has involved altering the heights of railway lines and cutting a new plaza at a lower level, interconnecting pedestrians and trains.
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| Bijlmer station belongs to the realm of fine architecture |
It has redefined a periphery in danger of fragmenting into disparate pieces of no man's land. Out of this urban chaos the architects have extracted a hybrid building with public spaces of real quality bathed in daylight coming through the crowning element, the oversailing roof. With its wooden lining, handsome skylights and well-articulated structure, the project submits industrial standardisation to a clear form, but without recourse to excessive technological gestures. High Tech? British? It is best to simply say that this work belongs to the realm of fine architecture.
So, what does this year's Stirling Prize shortlist say about the selection process, and even about the state of architecture in Britain today? It is hard to believe that this is truly representative of the best current architecture. Can one imagine showing the more mediocre of these projects in an international show alongside some of the vibrant work being produced in a country such as Spain? Why were Pawson's Bridge in Kew Gardens and Chipperfield's BBC scheme not brought in from the longlist?
But then lists themselves can be faulty, too. It is probable that there are other buildings which are the truly interesting works of our time. They are the ones which will eventually merit the attention of historians.
