1. Marshall Building, LSE, London
Grafton Architects
A multifaceted concrete palazzo for students, a place for learning, gathering, sport and music whose design runs several gamuts – grand and intimate, formal and twisting, calm and energetic. It has tree-like columns at the scale of motorway structures, sweeping staircases, alcoves for study and an expansive ground-floor “student commons”. You sense that its architects enjoyed designing it and that its users will enjoy being there.
2. Elizabeth line
Line-wide design by Grimshaw
The Elizabeth line, when it finally opened in May, revealed an alternative universe of underground railway travel where everything is bigger, brighter and swisher. This is due to the sheer scale of the stations and to their design – unified and orderly but also curvaceous and a touch baroque.
3. Homerton College dining hall, Cambridge
Feilden Fowles
An open and unstuffy take on the traditional Cambridge dining hall, well crafted but not piously so. It plays with a range of materials – aqueous green faience, pink concrete, a light timber structure – to enjoyable and surprising effects. Along with the LSE project, it’s evidence that much of the money and ambition in commissioning buildings currently comes from universities and colleges.
4. Clifford’s Tower, York
Hugh Broughton Architects
Broughton is best known for Antarctic research stations, perched on stilts above the snow and ice. Here he inserts a long-legged structure into a medieval monument, a timber platform resting on high pillars, that offers visitors views of York and shelter on their way up.
5. Serpentine pavilion 2022: Black Chapel, London
Theaster Gates
A plain black cylinder with high portals cut in it that nicely captured shadow and light and views of surrounding greenery.
