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If Irvine Sellar, the larger-than-life producer who presented London The 95-storey hypodermic pinnacle of the Shard, if it happened, would have been the UK’s tallest building joined by its sibling: a 72-storey tower rising above Paddington Station, two leviathans facing each other conspiring across the capital. Ultimately the Paddington Pole, as it became known, attracted the fury of heritage organizations and community groups, and after 1,800 objections, it was refused planning permission by Westminster Council.
Undaunted, Sellar and his architect Renzo Piano – the leading Italian director and co-creator, with Richard Rogers, from Paris’s Pompidou Center – returned to the drawing room and cut 54 steps. And so, in the reverse ferret that was a gift to the headline writers (“Pole-axed” trumpeted Building magazine), the Pole became the Cube: an 18-storey office block, homogenous, crystalline and curiously self-made, despite having a cubic chonk, its walls A glass of glass shows the London skyline.
Beyond being a successful tower, it also creates a new public space around its base, effectively improving Paddington station’s disappointing record. In the past, the passengers were ushered into the side of the road which looked like a giant mouse hole. Now, they are entered into a paved piazza, part of a network of passages and streets designed to place the station clearly and distinctly in its many locations.
Sellar, who once said that “with the Shard, we can kick the sand in front of the Eiffel Tower”, He died in 2017before witnessing the completion of the Cube or celebrating the validation of its brand and its inclusion, now known as Paddington Square, in this year’s shortlist. Stirling prizethe annual award for the best new building in Britain.
Sponsored by the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba), the grueling odyssey of regional and national awards has come to an end, with six contenders emerging to claim the coveted Stirling, with the winner announced in October.
On the short list led by what can be described as a “Jaguar dashboard” design school – well-refined and distinctly English, in terms of style and location – Paddington Square is the most visible area, in its size and being the only way not made of bricks. Otherwise, it is demolition between a brick building, a brick building, two brick additions to Cambridge colleges, and a brick extension to an existing stadium. In some ways, you may find it difficult to distinguish between examples of architectural skill.
Located on the edge of Epping Forest, Sergison Bates’ Fairmead House (made of pale Cumbrian brick) is a contemporary statement that captures and recreates the Georgian past. Mary Duggan and Ruff Architects’ Lion Green Road house (built of brick in three vibrant shades of brown) defies London’s typical streets and squares in favor of a group of squares set around a sloping parkland in green Croydon. Generous loggias and a thoughtful connection to the landscape elevate what could have been a new home.
The combination of not one but two of Cambridge’s colleges shows how the rarefied environment of Oxbridge academe, known for its high funding, control and competitive colleges, has a chance to win when it comes to creating good modern homes. However, assigning the equivalent of one-third of shortlists to this niche seems a bit overweight.
Haworth Tompkins has come to take on Pembroke College, whose alumni include Tom Hiddleston, Edmund Spenser and Pitt the Younger. Its plot consists of a new courthouse (dark brown brick), along with a disused church that has been converted into a new hall for use by the college and the community, among the necessary renovations. It’s a beautiful but powerful ensemble (rather like Hiddleston) and will no doubt age well, just as Pembroke has been doing since the 14th century.
Last year Stirling winner Witherford Watson Mann he was also chosen for the River wing at Clare College (very red bricks, in this case filling the wooden building), which wanders on a solid surface that returns to the River Cam with the courage of a ship in a bottle.
Finally, Bennetts Associates’ transformation of a theater in the 1970s in Hertford (light orange brick), takes the solid form of a sometimes unloved and dated building and transforms it into a new one, while maintaining a sense of community.
As unique as these projects may be, the shortlist looks the same. It’s like coming to a breakfast buffet and finding that only five types of muesli are available. And as was the case last year, the regions do not extend to Cambridge: there are none in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, or even the north or west of England.
Fast running for Riba Awards website it offers a wealth of information about national architecture, with people who have left, such as the Tarlair Pool, a British outdoor lido, a delicious ice cream parlor on the Aberdeenshire coast, restored and expanded by Studio Octopi. Or, for a different take on dreams, there’s the amazing David Kohn. house at New College Oxfordwhich drives Gaudí and the Teletubbies in a fruity melange of rhubarb and custard-colored stones, above the serpentine ceiling. Not a brick in the face.
Down in Redruth, Cornwall, is the Buttermarket, an iconic Georgian market venue that has been cleverly adapted by security experts Thread to suit a wide range of social and community events. Or there is the light of Squire & Partners’s Space House on the Kingsway in London, the famous “corn” tower of the 1960s designed by the veteran architect Richard Seifert, the developer of Centerpoint, which shows what can be done, architecturally and commercially, with a weak form.
All of this would lead to a short list, which could start a public discussion about what makes good architecture. In fact, with a series of stylistic homogeneity (Paddington excepted) it feels, however, as if the architects are talking among themselves.
