WINNERS 2024

Align JV with Ingérop and Jacobs (Engineers) and Grimshaw (Architects) for HS2

Elevated section of the new HS2 high speed railway line linking London and Birmingham. At just over two miles, the longest railway bridge in the United Kingdom, taking that distinction from the Victorian Tay Bridge at Dundee.

This is a tour de force, a project of such scale and ambition that it attracts superlatives. We have at last built a longer railway viaduct than the Victorians.

What might we have expected here? A forest of pilotis, a legion of identical stilts marching across the land? It might also easily have been surface level, with all the damage that entails. The Royal Fine Art Commission, which spent a vast amount of time in the mid twentieth century trying to improve bridge design, used to divide the larger specimens into (ponderous) elephants and (sprightly) greyhounds. This is certainly the latter. For such a massive object it treads lightly and moves delicately – even the expansion joints are elegant, and the decking is poised on bearings. The concrete is varied in form and treatment, with smooth surfaces set off by gentle corrugation; the acoustic wings attached to the sides of the bridge are, appropriately, light and airy. There is nothing gratuitous or pedestrian here, no applied ornament. The ornament is the structure itself.

The result is a breathtaking composition, its drama enhanced by its curving form as it crosses the lake, the curve of the whole picking up the curves of the individual arches, and then each curve reflected in the water. The composition is full of such delicately expressive moments. But is also muscular; it sees scale, strength and power as things to be celebrated, not mitigated or tamed.

We need work as fine as this. When the Department of Transport, in the late twentieth century, went through several rueful editions of The Design and Appearance of Bridges, it all came across as an exercise in exasperation: an exhortation to do better rather than a set of examples to emulate. There are, indeed, few examples of aesthetically powerful post-war transport projects outside London. The Severn and Forth Bridges, the split-level Wynhol Viaduct on the M5 at Bristol, now half a century old. At last, in this viaduct, we can say with confidence that we have another.

DaeWha Kang Design for the Hinduja Group

Remodelling of the courtyard of the Edwardian War Office building in Whitehall as part of its conversion to a luxury hotel. A circular restaurant pavilion with a roof in mirror-polished metal sits opposite a smaller sculptural fountain; the two are linked by cobbles laid to the same geometric pattern as the pavilion roof.

We have done well with our public spaces in London in the last quarter century, wresting them from the palsied grip of the civil servants who for decades used them to park their cars.

The Somerset House Courtyard and Horse Guards have been gloriously rescued from that dismal fate and are now among the finest public spaces in Europe. This is a miniature version of that same reversal. It calls to mind that couplet from Gray’s Elegy:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear.

Well this was a dark and unfathomed place, off-limits and largely invisible, imprisoned behind the iron gates and imposing façades of the old War Office, part of the parade of Portland stone ministries marching from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square. The War Office interiors are exuberant, opulent, a riot of Edwardian baroque, made for diplomatic intrigue.

Magnificently, in this omphalos of empire, the Hindujas have invested in recovering all that faded grandeur and in doing so have transformed a forlorn courtyard into a place of repose and delight. Intelligently, and sensitively, the cobbles have been reinstated and repatterned to form a herringbone motif. Set among them are two delicate, complementary gems: a circular pavilion and its mirror image, a reflective pool. It all remains discreet, like the hidden courtyard of a Parisian hôtel, but its discovery is all the more rewarding for that.

Lynch Architects for the City of Westminster and His Majesty’s Coroner for Inner-West London 

Extension to G.R.W. Wheeler’s 1893 coroner’s court, an exuberant essay in the Arts & Crafts idiom. The new building, in stone with oak-panelled interiors, contains a vaulted courtroom and family room adorned with stained glass windows designed by Sir Brian Clarke.

The business of this building is sombre. This is where the Grenfell inquests were held, where grieving families come to transact the bureaucracy of death, often tragic death. To be enveloped in a place of beauty in those circumstances is a kind of comfort and a kind of reassurance. The client and architect have troubled themselves to think deeply and seriously about how the trauma of that experience can be assuaged. The result is a dignified, contemplative space. From the fusion of art and architecture to the finely crafted interiors, to the calmness of the space, to the solidity and durability that speak of something eternal: all that effort stands as a consolation to the afflicted.

Extending a beautiful building is a challenge. Architects sometimes meet it with self-effacement, simply aiming to limit the damage. Here we have a higher ambition: to add something of beauty that lifts the whole. There is, happily, no attempt to ape the host building. We have, instead, creative dialogue from which has emerged a delicate companion piece, crisply and finely detailed; and clearly dated not just to the present century but to the present decade, just as the host building is firmly of the 1890s. The secular use of stained glass adds a spiritual dimension; Sir Brian Clarke’s designs are as striking as Piper’s or Chagall’s.

In its form the building calls to mind a dome-topped jewellery casket, in its crisp plainness one of Lutyens’s moving headstones to the fallen of the Great War, which spoke of equality in death. It takes chutzpah to present a plain, solid wall to the street, but this deceptively simple device lends the building solemnity as well as an inclusive neutrality.