A community centre made of recycled toilet bowls will go up against a naturally ventilated library and a “zero carbon” refurbishment of a 1980s office block, in this year’s competition for the UK’s best new building. As the country swelters in 40C heat, many people are looking at architecture’s role in the climate crisis and how intelligent design can help to reduce carbon emissions, while keeping occupants comfortable in increasingly extreme conditions.
The RIBA Stirling prize contender with the loudest boast of green credentials is 100 Liverpool Street, the transformation by Hopkins Architects of a Big Bang-era office block at Broadgate in the City of London. Where once stood a power-dressed fortress of trading floors clad in pink granite (which campaigners tried desperately to save), there now sprawls a corpulent black blob of flexible workspace and shops, its curving flanks wrapped entirely with glass. It’s not the prettiest thing on the list, but its developer, British Land, claims that it has achieved “net zero carbon” by reusing a third of the original building’s steel frame, as well as half of its concrete.
Look at the small print, however, and you will find that the net zero claim is backed up by offsetting the emissions elsewhere on the planet: paying for vast land restoration and tree planting schemes in Tibet and Mexico. The sheer amount of floor-to-ceiling glazing makes you wonder how hard the air conditioning will have been working this week – and how long it might be before the building is retrofitted with something akin to the previous sun-shading granite fins.
At the other end of the scale is the Sands End Arts and Community Centre, designed by Mæ architects for Hammersmith and Fulham council. Partly funded by the new Tideway “super sewer” project beneath the Thames, it is appropriately clad with buttery bricks made from 28 tonnes of recycled toilet bowls and other ceramic waste, the blocks laid on their side to reduce the number needed. Inspired by the form of some Victorian glasshouses that once stood on the site, the centre is designed as a series of monopitched pavilions arranged around a courtyard, with a cafe and spaces for events, exhibitions and meetings. Built from cross laminated timber, stained a warm green on the inside, these naturally ventilated rooms are a model for light-touch, low-carbon design, developed in close collaboration with the community.
A similarly careful approach can be found in the Hackney New Primary School by Henley Halebrown. Entering the courtyard of creamy glazed bricks has the feeling of arriving in a little cloister, with all classrooms opening on to the central playground, where undulating mounds bulge through the rubbery ground surface. The arrangement not only creates a sociable (and easily surveilled) layout, but it cleverly does away with corridors, thereby making the classrooms bigger than they would otherwise be.
In a sign of modern educational funding dynamics, an 11-storey apartment tower was also built on the site to help pay for the school, although it has been elegantly designed by the same architects so it feels less like an imposition than something with a positive civic presence. Chunky terracotta-coloured pillars line a sheltered colonnade along the main road, and a bench runs along the sidestreet, providing a place for parents to wait at the school gates. Inside, residents are treated to one of the most thrilling new staircases in the capital, a 10-storey octagonal spiral described by the jury as “like a wormhole to another dimension” – hopefully enticing enough to tempt people away from the lift.
A second educational project features in the form of the vast Falkirk campus of Forth Valley College in Scotland, by Reiach and Hall Architects. Replacing a 1960s building, the new development harks back to that era with a long, low-slung building clad with “floury bap” bricks, and a workshop block clad with profiled aluminium. As one of the largest publicly funded building projects in Scotland, it houses state of the art facilities for vocational training, including laboratories, a distillation plant, virtual control room, biotechnology centre, construction workshops, sports centre and training salons for hairdressing and beauty.
The building is organised as a sociable grid, with open learning spaces and classrooms arranged around courtyards and streets, while the rather generic office-like aesthetic of grey carpet and glass balustrades is enlivened by ochre-coloured rooflights that plunge through the ceiling. As the architects put it, the lowkey design reflects “the modesty of an institution that seeks to serve”.
Housing is represented on the shortlist this year in the form of Orchard Gardens, by Panter Hudspith Architects, part of the controversial redevelopment of the former Heygate Estate in London’s Southwark, rebranded as Elephant Park (another phase of which was shortlisted for the prize in 2016). Featuring 228 homes in a range of dense blocks, crowned with a tower, it looks like the result of putting a handful of recent London housing projects into a shredder and bolting the pieces back together in a higgledy-piggledy collage.
That’s not altogether a bad thing – it has created a varied, playful mass, with maisonettes on top of flats and recessed corner balconies – but the overall result feels overbearing. As the architects proudly state on their website: “We challenged the outline consented planning parameters, enabling increased heights.” Sadly the extra size didn’t help the desperate housing need: the overall development of 2,689 homes will contain just 92 social rented units – a puny number compared to the 1,200 that were demolished. It’s a reminder that, once again, the Stirling prize has overlooked one of the country’s most inventive and prolific architects of actual council housing, Peter Barber.
Finally, my personal favourite of the contenders is the new library for Magdalene College, Cambridge, designed by Níall McLaughlin Architects. Charged with the daunting brief of building next to the 17th-century Pepys library, and tasked with creating something that would last another 400 years, McLaughlin has risen to the challenge, creating an exquisitely crafted place of learning that more than holds its own among the illustrious neighbours.
Its facade has a neo-Tudor air, with tall brick ventilation chimneys framing projecting oak-panelled study nooks, beneath vaulted glass lanterns that bring daylight flooding into the reading rooms. Inside, as the RIBA judges comment, it feels “like inhabiting a hugely luxurious treehouse”. A wide variety of study spaces are arranged across a 3D “tartan grid” of timber beams and brick columns, with views cutting through and out to the trees and river beyond.
After two years of remote learning, it brings home the power of physical places for working “separately but together,” as the college librarian puts it. The clever natural ventilation system, as well as the thermal mass of the load-bearing brick walls, means it should stay cool enough, without reaching for the air-con switch.
The winner of the RIBA Stirling prize will be announced in October.
