A the fascinating Cambridge Wooden Mosque will go face to face with a Cornish walkway and a cluster of black boat decks in the Lakes District, in this year’s battle for the UK’s best new building. The 2021 Riba Stirling Prize race is joined by a new student center for Kingston University, a key urbanization for workers in Cambridge and a controversial block of stone apartments in London that was nearly demolished by the council. local.
The mosque is the most photogenic stunner on the list and most likely to snatch the gong. Designed by Marks Barfield, architects of the London Eye ferris wheel, it applies rigorous rigor to the creation of a fascinating cult clearing. A grid of tall tree-shaped columns branches outward, weaving into a structural filigree canopy that undulates above the prayer hall, echoing the shape of stone vaults. gothic and filtering daylight from the circular openings above. The £ 23 million building is a compelling combination of local and Islamic traditions, offering a powerful prototype of what could be a modern British mosque.
Photography: Hufton + Crow
An equally startling reinvention of a familiar type is presented in the form of the walkway of Tintagel Castle. Covering a dramatic ravine that separates the mainland of Cornia from the site of the Arthurian legend, the gossamer bridge shines like a cobweb-shaped dew turned by the ravine. The £ 5 million structure looks incredibly slender and comes down to nothing, where the two cantilevered halves meet a narrow gap. Designed by Belgian bridge specialists Ney & Partners, with William Matthews (who directed the design of the Shard skyscraper for Renzo Piano), it has an unusually handcrafted tactile quality for a piece of infrastructure. The handrails are made of raw oak, while the roof is lined with local slate tiles, wrapped around its edges without mortar, giving the pleasant feeling of walking through an After Eight coin box, above the falling waves.
A similar blend of crude and refined is in the Windermere Jetty Museum in the Lake District. Designed by Carmody Groarke as a modest cluster of black metal sheds, the £ 20 million complex is a refreshing exit from the national park’s usual insistence on dry stone walls and slate roofs. Inspired by nearby boat houses and farm barns, the black-oxidized copper walls of the sheds glow with a faint patina of verdigris, while the pieces have been carved into their sides, leaving the roofs floating with surreally deep cantilevers. Upholstered in warm Douglas fir wood, which resonates with the elegant pleasure boats on display, the buildings are carefully composed to frame views of the lake, allowing water to rise inside the building in some points, bringing curious swans and otters.
The length of time universities will now attract applicants to an increasingly competitive market is evident at Kingston’s £ 50m Town House, a new student center in London. Designed by Irish Pritzker Prize winners Grafton, the building combines a library and dance studios in a dynamic multi-storey cathedral, containing collisions and connections. Quiet study areas enjoy stunning views of the central performance space, while a wide staircase winds through the building and leads to a rooftop cafe with panoramic views of Hampton Court Palace and the Thames. A series of connected balconies cascade around the concrete-framed façade, which adds to the sense of the building as an open “learning landscape,” designed to foster casual encounters with fellow students, which seems like a good opportunity after months of online learning.
After a bold municipal housing plan in Norwich won the last prize in 2019, this year sees a rather boring Cambridge-funded housing project favoring the list. Stanton Williams ’key worker flats, which are part of Eddington’s new suburb, are inspired by the shape of the city’s university courts. Blown brick blocks form a series of loose, interconnected courtyards, linked by a richly varied landscaping designed by J&L Gibbons, which helps soften the rugged architecture.
It’s well-made, with tidy bike sheds and an innovative underground container warehouse, but the overall effect has something exorbitant about it. It’s an incessantly beige, lifeless place, perhaps in keeping with Accordia’s legacy, the 2008 Stirling Award-winning housing development across the city, which has settled. largely for many years of the last decade. One of Peter Barber’s quirky social housing projects would have made a more interesting inclusion in the shortlist (his projects have been limited to the Neave Brown award for separate housing, in which two of the four nominees are part).
Finally, to spice things up, comes a wild, original building that Islington Council did its best to excavate. From a distance, 15 Clerkenwell Close looks like something Fred Flintstone could have erected after glimpsed the work of Mies van der Rohe. Its façade is a square grid of columns and beams, but the pieces are monolithic pieces of limestone, recently appreciated from the quarry, with the sawn faces in various smooth, cleaved or perforated ways, which still show the marks of their palettes. Currently the stone is mostly reduced to a thin decorative cladding, but here it is doing the job of maintaining the building, which, according to its architect and developer Amin Taha, is cheaper, faster and embodies much less CO2 than an equivalent structure in steel or concrete.
It is a wonderful poetic spectacle, a modern ruin with now tangles that climb up to the rugged stone frame. A fallen column, with a half-finished Ionic capital sculpted on the rough face, leans toward the entrance, the spiral carving that echoes in the shape of an ammonite protruding from an upper slab: an allusion , like the bronze scallop shells that decorate the doors, to a nearby convent of nuns. From the glass box meeting room that rests on a beam I over Taha’s basement office, to the intricate folding, sliding closet of the upstairs apartments, to a clever glass lifting shaft that removes the need for bulky mechanical ventilation. the level of obsessive thinking has gone into every detail.
None of this was enough for the council, which declared the £ 5 million building to be “rough, ugly and detrimental to the conservation area” and notified a demolition notice, saying it was in breach of its planning permission. After a lengthy legal dispute (which delayed Stirling’s selection since 2018), a planning inspector was in favor of Taha.
It would be a bad revenge for this Neo-Neolithic masterpiece to win the award and its level of craftsmanship and innovation is certainly worthy. But for all its merits, it’s hard to see how judges opt for a luxury fantasy tailored to eight luxury flats above a project that makes a wider public contribution. My money is in the mosque, something modest from the outside, containing one of the most fascinating interior spaces built this century, a roof of King’s College Chapel for our new era of wood.