OVERALL WINNER

Tintagel Castle
Footbridge, Cornwall

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.

Commended (Engineering)

Leeds Footbridge

Gagarin Studio with DP Squared for Citu

Single-span steel footbridge across the River Aire, linking two parts of Leeds’ Climate Innovation District which, when complete, will contain 500 low-carbon homes. The weathered-steel balustrades are cranked through a series of profiles to create a twisting concertina form.

Here we have the opposite scenario to Tintagel: a bridge stamping a mark on a blank canvas. This is beauty used as a catalyst, an attractor, something showing the way and expressing confidence and optimism. The clients have understood that investment in the visual quality of a gateway project like this, uniting a development site bisected by the River Aire, inspires hope that what comes next will be equally thoughtful: it sets a standard, denotes expectations and encourages others to put their faith in the wider development. The delicacy and slenderness are impressive for a 165ft span.

BUILDING AWARD

WINNER McGrath Road housing, Stratford, East London

Peter Barber Architects for the London Borough of Newham

High density, shared-ownership housing development set around a central courtyard, a reinterpretation of Victorian back-to-back housing typology.

Peter Barber is one of most innovative and exciting of social housing architects, creating  developments with marked visual and kerb appeal. The care, attention to detail and imagination evident in his projects is a lesson for all low-cost housing providers. High-quality materials, provision of communal space and a robust, muscular aesthetic  – all evident at McGrath Road – generate pride and a sense of ownership in residents (as was clear to the judges when they visited) and act as a beacon locally, giving a lift and a sense of civility to a neighbourhood that suffers the usual inner-city problems of crime and anti-social behaviour. The articulation and massing are impressive: clever breaks in the façade and the use of parabolas reminiscent of Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna elevate not just the building but its surroundings. And by following the pavement line, the building has a proper sense of definition: instead of offering the residents uncontrolled waste space on the street side, the architects have given them defensible space in the form of a communal courtyard. As a demonstration that social housing can be both urban and urbane, the project has few equals.

Commended

The Oglesby Centre, Manchester

Stephenson Hamilton Risley Studio for Hallé Concerts Society

Corten steel and brick extension to a deconsecrated (but listed) Victorian church, housing rehearsal, performance, education and ancillary spaces for the Hallé Orchestra and Choir.

This distinctive contemporary extension is an attempt not to ape but to add, with the result that the host building, instead of being diminished by weakly imitative architecture, is elevated by a respectful but confident neighbour. The Ancoats area of central Manchester (and this is true of most Northern city centres) has a wealth of fine brick Victorian buildings and plenty of tawdry brick-veneered residential blocks from the past twenty years, most of it so superficial a response to the built inheritance that it ends up debasing it. Here the response is well-judged. Bricks have been specified to match those of the 1880s Italianate church and the massing is contrived to allows views of its campanile but subservience is avoided in favour of a building with sufficient quality and a strong enough personality to make its own powerful contribution.

Welcome Building, RHS Garden Bridgewater, Salford

Hodder + Partners for The Royal Horticultural Society

Pavilion with an overarching glulam timber diagrid roof structure supported on structural glulam trees, providing visitor facilities on the former Worsley New Hall estate.

This is partly a garden building, akin to a folly or eyecatcher in a designed landscape; partly also a gateway, whetting the visitor’s appetite for the delights beyond. Both functions it performs well. As the previous focal point of the estate, Worsley New Hall, disappeared as long ago as the 1940s, this building has to serve to some extent as a substitute, a visual anchor. Its primary purpose though is as as form of public concourse, filtering visitors before their onward journey. To that extent it is almost analagous to say, Stansted, another beautifully-executed arrivals hall; a less felicitous point in common is that the visual purity of both has been compromised by signage and other assorted clutter. Care should be taken on that front at Salford, in order to preserve the excellence that a fine architect has delivered for a discerning client.

PUBLIC SPACE

WINNER Illuminated River, London

Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands and Leo Villareal for Illuminated River Foundation

Lighting project stretching 3.2 miles across nine Thames bridges in central London. LED light sources are controlled by custom software, so that patterns are never repeated. Light spill is carefully controlled to avoid disturbing the riparian ecology.

Until recently – until this project, more precisely – the Thames in central London was a black ribbon with precious little night-time personality, its darkness punctuated every so often by more or less random floodlighting. No more. This art installation, covering three miles of the serpentine river, acts as a permanent yet ever-mutating light festival: the lighting on each bridge changes to a timed sequence but also with the tide and the river’s moods – the reflections on the water mean that this is a light show on the river itself as much as on the static mass of the bridges. The project places our liquid superhighway where it deserves to be, centre-stage, no more so than in September 2022 when it buoyed the queue for The Queen’s lying-in-state and then again when it provided a spectacular canvas for the dusk flotilla in memory of The Queen.

Commended

Walala Parade, Leyton, London 

Camille Walala for the shop owners of Leyton High Street

Crowdfunded mural covering the façade of eight different buildings, partly using donated leftover paint. The final design was voted on by the local community.

This reinvigoration of a scrappy London shopping parade – it happens to be in Leyton but could be in any number of London high streets – has such flamboyance as to be almost transgressive, and in lesser hands it might have been, but the effect is life-enhancing. Far from being spruced up, the varied shopfronts are simply swept up into the art as objets trouvés, lending the project a gritty and slightly anarchic dimension. Mercifully so: this is not like a townscape heritage initiative where all is prim and proper; nor is it the kind of pious public art that is often pressed into service to leaven antiseptic gentrification. This remains earthy East London in Mondrianesque gladrags.

Borough Yards, Southwark, London

SPPARC Architects for MARK

Mixed-use development set around new public space, alongside Borough Market. The project reuses 90,000 sq ft of railway arch, converting some into a public arcade that helps reestablish mediaeval street patterns lost when the railway viaduct was built.

The snaking railway lines that carved through the South Bank of London nearly two centuries ago  remain a massive, brooding impediment. A vital artery fifty feet up, they induce sclerosis at ground level, frustrating movement, fracturing the city and choking activity by putting whole acres out of commission. Yet the potential for more productive use is considerable. This project helps breach the barrier through a clever mix of elegant new-build, quiet space away from the melée of neighbouring Borough Market and, not least, the introduction of permeability through the redeployment of railway arches as arcades. The result is a charming piece of urban knitwork that draws people in not by cacophonous signage but by its sense of calm and by the simple appeal of its brick fabric.

LITTLE GEM

WINNER Tower of Light and Wall of Energy, Manchester

Tonkin Liu Architects for Manchester City Council and Vital Energi

Combination of a tower, clad in laser-cut steel sheets in a shell-lace structure developed with Arup, that houses flues for a low-carbon energy centre; and a street wall clad in ceramic tiles in a tessellated lozenge pattern.

Projects of this sort can be stage-set flimsy, the visual appeal fading from the moment the cheap materials collide with the messy reality of city living. But these structures are convincing and solid, beautifully made in durable materials: one feels their aesthetic appeal will grow rather than ebb with time. In daylight the ceramic tiles give the wall  a strong personality. Clever lighting gives the tower an equally powerful presence at night, when the perforations in the envelope mutate into compelling patterns and the surface reflects the headlights of passing cars. This is a dramatic intervention that helps redeem a banal junction recently sullied by pedestrian new buildings: it is precisely places like these that need redemption if our cities are not to split into prettified ghettos and remaining acres abandoned to mess and detritus.

Commended

House in Leyton, London

McMahon Architecture for a private client

Detached brick house comprising two distinct blocks, a monolithic masonry plinth at street level and a finely detailed timber structure above.

The obvious solution for this infill site in a largely identikit street would have been to knock up a debased version of the neighbouring Victorian terraces, mimicking their form but lacking their craft. Happily the architect chose the more adventurous route of producing an exciting essay in delicate latticed brickwork, the house set back behind a perforated wall that provides enclosure while maintaining a visual connection with the street. The effect is enticing, enlivening and at the same time disciplined: an exotic interlude and an antidote to the jumble that so often afflicts streets of this sort, with front gardens a broken-down mess of improvised car parking and rubbish bins.

69 Old High Street and The Cabins, 23-25 Tontine Street, Folkestone

Neat for the Roger De Haan Charitable Trust

The Old High Street project is mixed-use residential/workspace development across three historic building plots in Folkestone Old Town conservation area, its bright red fins appearing as a continuous  façade when viewed obliquely. In Tontine Street, a cluster of simple timber-framed buildings in the tradition of seaside weatherboarding houses a variety of creative uses.

Sir Roger de Haan deserves credit for his innovative model of buying land and investing in permanent low-rent space for creatives: a prescription for the kind of slow, organic growth that feeds true urban vitality. We are used to highly-controlled, manicured development of the sort that can thwart true creativity, and with meanwhile developments that give it a moment to flourish. The Folkestone model enables the authentic, anarchic, enduring beauty that develops if a thousand flowers are allowed to bloom. Along with other local improvements, these charming artists’ studios have been a tonic for Tontine Street, previously marred by anti-social behaviour. And the adjacent Old High Street project uses bold colour with conviction and confidence, avoiding the modern terror of random polychromy, the twenty-first century equivalent of flinging paint pots in the face of the public.

Ivy Street, Hoxton, London

Sam Jacob Studio for Sam Jacob / Ivy Street Family Centre

Community facility with apartment above and retained pub façade alongside, topped with timber-clad volumes at roof level.  

This bullnosed barbican of a building occupies a prominent island site, next to a disused pub and across from a monolithic post-war housing block, that could so easily have been infilled with low-grade development or left vacant to attract rubbish and graffiti. Either would have accelerated a downward spiral and cemented the fractured banality of the immediate locality. Instead, the pub has been spared obliteration (we count the loss of pubs as a significant loss of simple quotidian beauty) and Sam Jacob has invested in a beautiful jewel of a building that adds wit and fun while also being a serious and powerful piece of architecture: at once both expressive and introspective. We need more such civilising interventions in our inner cities.

Floating Church, Hackney Wick, London

Denizen Works for The Diocese of London

Church and community space serving two Stepney parishes. Moored on the River Lea Navigation in East London, on the edge of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

A beautifully-crafted and imaginative project: the designers have taken inspiration from organ bellows and the classic Volkswagen camper van to produce a concertina pop-up roof that rises to give headroom in the ‘nave’ and lowers to allow passage under canal bridges. Fashioned from translucent sail cloth, the roof functions as a lantern when raised, advertising church services; the literal raising of the roof is a spectacle in itself. The beauty here is intermittent, as an ordinary canal boat shapeshifts into a delicate beacon, and is the more compelling for it.

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