OVERALL WINNER

Bayside Apartments, Worthing, Sussex

Allies and Morrison for Roffey Homes 

Mixed-tenure housing development comprising a 170ft seafront tower alongside a six-storey garden square and a beachside café. The tower is a fully-glazed orthogonal block, set behind generous rippling balconies with slim white metal railings. 

This is an impressive exercise in using local references to create an original and powerful landmark – a worthy replacement for the depressing 1960s swimming pool that previously occupied the site and which, ironically, turned its back on the sea. It sits literally beachside and forms an exclamation mark that counterbalances the horizontal mass of the pier. At the same time, it bookends the seafront terraces of Regency Worthing, harmonising well with their white stucco while steering clear of weak historicism. Its location at the point of transition between the Regency town and later development gives it a particular job to do: this is often the point at which close-grained townscape reaches a sputtering end, petering out into dispiriting ribbon development. This building mitigates that by holding out the promise of a place worth visiting. Viewed from the distant pier, it announces itself as a destination – not aggressively, but as a complement to the historic town. At close quarters, the sinuous balconies offer visual variety and even a maritime echo, but in a disciplined way. Sometimes seaside buildings can be over-literal in their references, with clodhopping detailing in the shape of waves and prows. Here it is done evocatively but subtly. Viewed obliquely, the sea-facing elevation is wonderfully playful, but seen full-frontal from the beach it is rigorous and devoid of frippery.

Commended (Building)

Barking Riverside Station, London

WW+P for Transport for London / Barking Riverside Ltd

London Overground railway station serving the nascent Barking Riverside development, part of the Thames Gateway regeneration area. Transport facilities are at the upper level, linking to a new viaduct. The ground floor, opening onto a new town square, serves as a community hub.  

This is on the London Overground line and serves the new Barking Riverside development in the Thames Gateway regeneration area. Platforms are at the upper level, linking to a new viaduct. The ground floor, opening onto a new town square, serves as a community hub. Around a third of the 10,000 homes planned for the local area have already been built and the station handled half a million journeys in its first year, but for the visitor the first impression is still one of relative emptiness. So to some extent this is a pioneer structure. And it’s also of course a key point of arrival and departure. So it has a heavy load to bear as a gateway, anchor and beacon.  In our view it does those jobs with the style we have a right to expect of a railway station. Architects sometimes forget that station users are captive spectators, often with time on their hands and little to occupy it. They deserve uplifting surroundings and in this building they get them: this is a coolly elegant, disciplined piece of work, light and airy at platform level with a distinctive band of perforated Corten steel running the length of the building. The result is a building with personality, visual coherence and even echoes of classical hierarchy in its arrangement of plinth and piano nobile.

One Silk Street, Manchester

Mecanoo for Northern Group 

300,000sq ft housing and office building faced in handmade red brick to complement the surviving industrial architecture of Ancoats, which has the highest concentration of listed mill buildings in Manchester. 

A robust building that draws on the warehouse aesthetic common in Ancoats, with its legacy of Victorian mills, and adapts it intelligently. This is not pale imitation but a well-realised update, a confident and disciplined piece that reinforces the historic grid pattern, maintains the building line and has a strong street presence. The building is rooted in context; expressive elements, such as the stepped reveals that articulate the façade, are controlled within a restrained envelope. To some extent One Silk Street is a pioneer, in the vanguard of neighbourhood regeneration, and it sets an impressive tone for adjacent development sites. There is always a risk in our great northern cities that one misstep will lead to others by setting a poor precedent; very quickly, neighbourhoods can be filled with the bad and the ugly. By contrast, the urbanity and attention to detail in this building make it a worthy model: there’s a reasonable chance it will encourage others to raise their game and in doing so will help mould a genuinely vibrant quarter.

ENGINEERING AWARD

WINNER Woolbeding Glasshouse, Midhurst, Sussex

Eckersley O’Callaghan (Facade and Structural Engineers) and Heatherwick Studio for the Woolbeding Charity  

Ten-sided, 1500sq ft subtropical greenhouse inspired by Victorian ornamental terrariums. The roof opens using a hydraulic mechanism to give the plants direct sunlight and ventilation. 

This is a muscular piece of equipment that performs a delicate task with delicacy. On one level it is an eyecatcher in a sublime designed landscape: from that perspective it bears comparison, though on a smaller scale, to I.M. Pei’s celebrated summer house (also glass and aluminium) at Oare in Wiltshire. This version has the added attraction of movement, the sepals opening slowly and deliberately as the petals of a plant might in response to light. Fully open, they resemble the rays of a crown when seen from the ground, or a lotus flower when seen from above. The greenhouse was funded using the final funds of the Monument Trust, founded by Simon Sainsbury, who would we feel have seen in this small but perfectly-formed building an object of quiet delight.

Commended

Cody Dock Rolling Bridge, Bow Creek, London

Price and Myers (Structural Engineers) with Thomas Randall-Page (Designer) and Cake Industries (Fabricator) for the Gasworks Dock Partnership 

Footbridge made from weathered steel and untreated stem-bent oak, sitting at the entrance to a reflooded dock off a tidal estuary of the River Lea in East London. The bridge is powered manually, with levers used to rotate it and allow boats to pass.

A joyous way of helping to revivify a contaminated and derelict stretch of post-industrial riverside, this bridge is as much a piece of sculpture and a diverting spectacle as a functional crossing. The beauty is in the details. First in the slow rolling of the bridge as it opens and closes. Then in the elegantly serpentine gear-teeth tracking cut into the dock walls, a Hogarthian line of beauty whose path is determined by functional requirements rather than whimsy. The raw aesthetic pays clever homage to the site’s industrial past, reminding us that the surest route to beauty may lie in letting materials speak for themselves, rather than covering them in ornament. As Saint-Exupéry said, perfection is achieved not when no more can be added, but when no more can be taken away.

PUBLIC SPACE

WINNER Elephant Park, Elephant and Castle, London

Gillespies for Lendlease 

A sequence of landscaped spaces conceived as part of the regeneration of the old Heygate Estate in south London and operating on a range of scales, from a new set-piece park (at two acres one of the largest post-war parks in central London) to a transformation of the streetscape along a major traffic artery.       

A project that brings genuine, lasting improvements to the public realm in a neighbourhood that has come close in the recent past to being an urban dystopia, blighted by gargantuan post-war developments that became more and more oppressive as they fell into decay. This subtle network of green spaces has a redemptive, softening quality that knits together a renewed townscape and holds out the promise of a more civilised future. It operates across an impressive range: the repertoire spans not just set-piece parks but transformed pavements, notably along the New Kent Road where a flyblown streetscape is refashioned into an elegant, urbane stretch. At times there is almost an improbable aspect of cosmopolitan chic. Elephant Park itself is the centrepiece, but from that flow tendrils of greenery that beautifully unite the whole.

Commended

Battersea Power Station Public Realm, London

LDA Design for Battersea Power Station Development Company 

Gardens and public space taking up nearly half the 42-acre power station estate and comprising a variety of sites including a public square, a six-acre riverside park and a plaza outside the new underground station. Ninety-five bird species haave so far been recorded on what for decades was a derelict wasteland. 

The long-awaited renewal of Battersea Power Station has been a triumph, propelling Giles Gilbert Scott’s leviathan from the throes of dereliction to a pulsating new life as a leisure and retail destination. Part of the success comes from the generosity and quality of the surrounding public realm, a beautifully-judged mix of intimate spaces and grand vistas that includes, uniquely in west London, a piazza running down to the river: a place from which to contemplate the brick cliff of Scott’s north front in all its cathedral-like magnificence, almost as you might the Torre del Mangia from the Campo in Siena. It makes a welcome change from narrow, linear riverside walkways. Cleverly, this new urban landscape embraces the power station. On a micro level, artefacts of industrial archaeology are embedded in the planting: relics of pumping machinery, fluted fragments of the old chimneys that call to mind fallen classical columns at Paestum. On a macro level, the park extends into the Thames, incorporating the old coaling jetty and thus reconnecting the power station with the river that was its raison d’être.

LITTLE GEM

WINNER Plas Glyn-y-Weddw, Llanbedrog, Gwynedd

Sanderson Sculpture /Mark Wray Architects / Fold for Plas Glyn-y-Weddw

Sculptural addition to Wales’s oldest art gallery, comprising marine-grade structural glazing wrapped in an envelope textured with nearly 90,000 handcrafted stainless steel barnacles. These create a permeable layer that filters natural light to the interior. 

This café, a playful addition to a small Victorian country house that now serves an arts centre, stands in a recent tradition of zoomorphic and parametric extensions to historic buildings: Zaha Hadid’s café addition to Decimus Burton’s Powder Magazine in Hyde Park is an exemplar. Inspired by the globular form of sea urchins, covered in welded encrustations and with a touch of Oriental exoticism to the interior, it has enough chutzpah and romantic appeal to become a destination in its own right. Certainly it is more likely to raise a smile than the politely conventional conservatory it replaced. On a practical note, the highly-textured carapace and determinedly non-orthogonal form are likely to preserve the integrity of the design, providing a kind of in-built protection against the rash of random signs and notices that so easily creeps over small buildings of this sort.

Commended

Angel Yard, Edmonton, London

Jan Kattein Architects for Enfield Council 

A meanwhile development on the Joyce and Snell’s Estate, providing 6500 sq ft of affordable workspace and  community facilities on the site of lock-up garages. Each workspace occupies the footprint of an old garage, reusing its foundations, and has a ‘shop window’ overlooking an internal street sheltered by translucent canopies.

This temporary ensemble, creating small affordable workspaces on a microscopic budget, might easily have been banal. But instead it manages to muster beauty in a down-at-heel neighbourhood on the cusp of comprehensive redevelopment. The architects have replaced a rundown row of garages with a low-key but surprisingly delicate piece of work that understands the dramatic value of small spaces and makes effective use of basic materials such as plywood, notably in the miniature but uplifting two-storey work units with their charming barrel-vaulted ceilings. Amid the decay, this stands as an exemplar of what can be achieved through attention to detail. More generally, it serves as a statement of faith in a neighbourhood where hopelessness could all too easily take root. The warmth of the reception from local people suggests that this far-sighted investment by the local authority is likely to have a catalytic effect.

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