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For the second 12 months in a row, the Riba Stirling Prize, the UK’s most prestigious structure award, has gone to a college constructing.
The New Library at Magdalene School in Cambridge attracts on totally different influences from the final half a millennium, together with tall Tudor-style chimneys, in a undertaking by Níall McLaughlin that has received over the judges of this 12 months’s award, introduced on Thursday.
It follows final 12 months’s victory for Grafton Architects, creators of Kingston college’s Townhouse, one other library and multipurpose tutorial constructing.
It is usually the second consecutive 12 months it has been received by Irish architects, though McLaughlin has been primarily based in London all through his profession.
The New Library replaces a neighbouring library gifted to the school by Seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys. Designed to final for 400 years, with high quality supplies and pure air flow, the design was a preferred selection for first prize.
Inbuilt load-bearing brick and timber, its gabled roofs recall earlier constructions within the faculty and round Cambridge, although the fabric palette echoes the decidedly trendy British Library in London. With a double-height, top-lit central area alongside nook nooks and window seats readers have each public or non-public areas to occupy.
The library was picked from a shortlist of largely unshowy initiatives. A college and housing block in London’s Hackney by Henley Halebrown is a strong and urbane constructing in sandstone pink with an actual civic presence.
One other contender, by Hopkins Architects, is a change of 100 Liverpool Avenue in London, an present workplace constructing, which takes a extra sustainable strategy to industrial structure.
Just one different constructing on the listing of finalists, aside from the winner, is outdoors London, the Forth Valley faculty in Falkirk, by Reiach and Corridor.
This 12 months’s shortlist signifies the difficulties inherent in evaluating disparate constructing sorts and in understanding what the structure prize stands for in as we speak’s society.
The comparatively understated shortlists of the previous few years have clearly illustrated the modifications in British structure, a step away from the massive cultural blockbusters of the early 2000s, recipients of lottery funding, and in direction of smaller and extra regionally engaged initiatives.
The successful entry illustrates the present tilt in direction of sustainability. Constructed of brick and timber it eschews concrete, which has slightly fallen out of style owing to its carbon footprint. Its look is perhaps somewhat Tudor however it’s resolutely trendy.
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