The Stirling Prize is only one part genuine prize for the deserving. The rest is designed to combat the bad PR forever leaking out of Wembley/the Dome/Scottish Parliament/Bath Spa, by convincing us that architecture really isn’t that expensive/late/over budget. In fact, it is really rather beautiful and worth all that awful bother in the end. The genuinely deserving do on occasion win, though it depends on which way the wind’s blowing when the judges — the American landscape designer Martha Schwartz, Mariella Frostrup, the architects Ian Ritchie and Stefan Behnisch and the editor of the
Architects Journal, Isabel Allen, corralled by Kevin McCloud — judge.
The official line says that the Stirling goes to the British-designed building “which has been the most significant for the evolution of architecture in the past year”, a sentence packed with assumptions. Does it go to the prettiest? The most thrilling? To the architect most deserving? Or, old-fashioned notion this, to the building that best fulfils its brief, be it a bicycle shed or a cathedral?
RUNNERS AND RIDERS
Barajas Airport, Madrid
Richard Rogers Partnership
The ceiling: very important in an airport. Design it like billowing clouds tethered to the ground and the Kafkaesque insanity that air travel has become can be abated slightly by giving the impression not of smothering claustrophobia but of the reason that you’re all actually here: flying. Norman Foster used the device 15 years ago at Stansted. Rogers has made the clouds more billowing, thanks to advances in computer-aided design, and jollier. Each part of the mile-long building is painted to match your boarding card.
It’ll win if . . . the judges have had their fill of Ryanair moments. Or if it’s Richard Rogers’s turn. He’s never won.
Brick House, West London
Caruso St John
Architecture critics love Adam Caruso and Peter St John. No celebrity nonsense for them. No bright colours. Instead, they sit quietly in their East London office, working slowly on jobs that they have picked because they actually like them.
They make architecture as it should be, with real presence.Brick House is intelligently wedged into its teeny site, cleverly grabbing light through skylights and courtyards and celebrating that very mundane, very British material, the brick.
It’ll win if . . . they want a pair of quiet, intelligent architects and a very, very private house that nobody can visit. Or if the judges feel guilty; Caruso St John were robbed in 2000 when their intelligent New Art Gallery, Walsall, lost out to Will Alsop’s prettier Peckham Library.
Evelina Children’s Hospital, London
Hopkins Architects
It’s got the “ahhh” factor. A new children’s hospital, and humanely designed (free daylight for every child). Any more heartstrings to be plucked? Designing new Labour’s new hospitals so that they don’t look like B&Qs on a budget is the hot topic among architects whose social conscience and stamina is mighty enough to hack through the dense jungle of NHS reforms.
Most jobs have been grabbed by bland-but-safe mega-firms. This is a freakishly rare occasion where a good architect — Michael Hopkins is the quieter one of the “Foster, Grimshaw, Rogers, Farrell” generation — meets a good client, and the result is good architecture that might actually make you feel better.
Extra points for doing so on a corset-tight Private Finance Initiative budget. Otherwise, it’s a bit Hopkins-by-numbers.
It’ll win if . . . they want to make a terribly serious point about the importance of good healthcare architecture.
Idea Store, Whitechapel
Adjaye Associates
Once you get past the name, it’s a convincing take on what a modern library could be — cosy, chic even — and an all-too-rare instance of civic space where you can hang out with no particular purpose without being moved on or asked to buy a latte.
Adjaye has long been touted as British architecture’s hot young thing, after a succession of high-society projects: but this, he says, is him showing his true colours as a politically engaged architect. It’s not bad — better inside (mood-stimulating interiors being his forte) than out (he’s not quite cracked exterior form making) — but his career’s still a work in progress.
It’ll win if . . . they want a bit of controversy: architecture designed to unite a socially complex bit of the city, just down the road from one of London’s biggest mosques.
National Assembly for Wales, Cardiff
Richard Rogers Partnership
Not bad at all. Another Rogers, another great rippling roof. (Though no jolly colours this time, for fear, I suspect, of making Welsh politicians seem less than serious.) But its original ideas (a light and airy agora by the water) have been snipped away by its convoluted building history, to the point of fatal compromise.
It’ll win if . . . they want to please the Welsh, or, again, to anoint Rogers.
Phaeno Science Centre, Wolfsburg, Germany
Zaha Hadid Architects
Everyone swooned when this opened. For years Zaha Hadid played the stereotypical pathologically uncompromising architect who will stop at nothing to get built designs that society either doesn’t understand or doesn’t believe possible.
Then someone took a punt on her and she actually delivered what her inspiration, the 1920s supremacist artist Kasimir Malevich, promised: “We can only perceive space when we break free from the earth, when the point of support disappears.”
This is rollercoaster, “look no hands” architecture, designed — purely and simply — to thrill. It’s a rebel without an explicit cause — moral, intellectual, political — other than pure architectural gymnastics: and, frankly, sometimes that’s all that you want in a building.
It’ll win if . . . the Stirling is actually about great architecture. It’s also got good looks and a superstar, media-savvy architect to boot. A cert.
The Stirling Prize 2006 is on Channel 4 on Saturday, 8pm. Vote for the “People’s Choice” on 09011 191919 or see www.channel4.com/stirling
Stirling Prize: the winners of the past ten years
2005 Scottish Parliament building, Edinburgh, by EMBT/RMJM
2004 30 St Mary Axe, London, aka the Gherkin, by Foster and Partners
2003 Laban dance centre, London, by Herzog & de Meuron
2002 Gateshead Millennium Bridge, by Wilkinson Eyre Architects
2001 Magna Science Adventure Centre, Rotherham, by Wilkinson Eyre Architects
2000 Peckham Library, South London, by Alsop & Störmer
1999 Lord’s Media Centre, London, by Future Systems
1998 Imperial War Museum (aircraft collection), Duxford, Cambridgeshire, by Foster and Partners
1997 Music School, Stuttgart, by Michael Wilford
1996 Centenary Building, Salford University, by Stephen Hodder
