The inaugural Royal Fine Art Commission Trust International Building Beauty Prize was awarded at the World Architecture Festival in Lisbon in December 2022. The judges –Stephen Bayley, the architect Yael Reisner and the architectural writer and curator Owen Hopkins – selected the winner from nine shortlisted projects following live presentations by the architects. The winning and highly commended projects are shown below. The full shortlist can be seen by downloading the awards brochure.
K-Studio for Dexamenes
Seaside hotel that reuses a group of derelict winery tanks on the Peloponnese coast that had lain relatively untouched since the 1920s. The architects played on the bare aesthetic of the site and avoided introducing alien elements or materials: this objective of preserving the history and raw beauty of the existing buildings led them to their palette of concrete, steel and engineered glass, with the addition of timber as a nod to the nautical context.
Durbach Block Jaggers / John Wardle Architects for Judith Neilson
Hub for visual and performing arts. The brick skin provides visual coherence, canting, curving and stepping to embrace a street garden and multi-figured ‘cloud window’. The bricks are unusually long and flat, akin to a stacked stone and emphasising the mortar joints. A thin veil of mortar has been washed over them to exaggerate the continuity of surface. This surface is then twisted, cut, vaulted and pressed inward, notably where a dimple is formed to frame a large oculus.
Ney & Partners and William Matthews Associates for English Heritage
225ft-span steel bridge providing level access to Tintagel Castle, comprising two cantilevers with a gap in the middle to allow for expansion. Footway of slate quarried locally from Delabole, with handrails in oak and stainless steel balustrades designed to be fine enough to disappear against the sky when viewed from a distance.
This was a challenging assignment, given the terrain and the sensitivity of the site as both an ancient monument and a place of natural beauty. How best to complement the dramatic context? The answer is not timidity but the kind of boldness that suits the rough and raw Atlantic coast of Cornwall. The designers, necessarily, have understood every inch of their canvas and from an intellectual response to the engineering requirements have generated something graceful, perfectly poised, restrained: nothing here is unnecessary but what is necessary has been finessed to the point of beauty. The result is a functional and aesthetic triumph, a striking footpath to a spectacle that is a spectacle in itself: it is perfectly possible to imagine that, as with other fine bridges, this will become much more than a means of spanning a void and become an attraction in its own right.
