GRAND WINNER AND LITTLE GEM WINNER

The Story of Emily,
St. Ive, Cornwall

Stonewood Design for The Story of Emily / The Newt in Somerset

Privately-funded museum documenting the life and work of Emily Hobhouse, who campaigned against the use of concentration camps in the Boer War. Together with the Victorian rectory, where Emily lived as a child, the new museum is the twin focus of an estate restored and reinvented by the South African investor Koos Bekker.

This is really a collection of gems. To the established ones – a fourteenth century church and a rectory newly furnished, to the last authentic detail, in High Victorian style – the architects have added a zinc-clad exhibition space and a series of ancillary buildings faced in handcrafted Cornish stone. The cumulative effect in this evocative landscape is one of deep harmony. Everything bears scrutiny, in fact looks even better on close inspection. To achieve that is expensive, and indeed money has been splashed. But that is no guarantee of tasteful results. Far more important is that every penny has been well-spent, delivering a series of exquisitely-crafted buildings that easily avoid the trap of mere showiness. Sometimes there is even a hint of austerity, as in the windowless exhibition hall, its only opening a slice in the zinc as if a can has been peeled open. It is all beautifully controlled.

Which is not to say there are no exuberant touches, even extravagant ones. The structural glass wall in the restaurant, a single pane measuring sixty-five feet by ten, is astonishing for its sheer chutzpah but also for the technical skill involved. This is the largest piece of glass in the world, overtaking the pane in the lobby of the Taikang Financial Tower in Peking. Merely transporting it from Germany, where it was made, was a feat. The result is an unobstructed view of the reborn walled garden. The edges between inside and outside are blurred and the gardens, seen on a typically misty, dripping Cornish day, become as much dreamscape as landscape.

It is not just the big things here that are beautiful. Attention to detail is also evident in the scalloped oak joinery in the shop, the South African yellowwood in the restaurant, the greenhouses and stone outbuildings; in the smallest spaces, such as the loos, that are easily abandoned to mediocrity; and in the absence of collateral junk, such as bossy signage and the messy impedimenta of the health and safety industry, that so often kills illusion. It is all lightly but purposefully curated from the moment of arrival, and one leaves enriched by a powerful sensory experience.

BUILDING AWARD

WINNER Centre of Excellence for Heritage Craft Skills, York Minster

Tonkin Liu Architects for the Chapter of York

Workshops, training facilities and accommodation for apprentice stonemasons, on a site within the Minster precinct and abutting the city walls.

The setting is one of England’s most venerable: within York’s city walls, next to the Deanery, in direct line of sight from the Minster. The architects have risen to the challenge with a timber horseshoe set around a quadrangle. The effect is collegiate, apprentices and master craftsmen working together in productive communion.

The fine touches are plentiful. To the south, the clerestory windows give the apprentices a view of the Minster and reflect its Central Tower. To the north, they turn the city wall into a viewing gallery with a shifting cast of spectators, providing a direct visual link between apprentices and townsfolk. The apprentices’ accommodation, akin to monks’ cells, has delightful stable doors opening onto a communal garden. The serpentine rainwater run-off channels are functional but playful. Grass grows haphazardly between the setts in the courtyard.

There is a gently cloistered feel but this is a place of industry, a place for making beautiful things, for carving the stone that adorns the Minster and refining the skills that preserve it. The flight of manufacturing has left most city centres bereft of such places, but they contribute greatly to true urban vitality. As a training space and workplace, this centre of excellence is uplifting and inspiring; not shut away but connected to light, life and the historic city.

We expect architects to be thoughtful. It is a basic requirement. But it is still easy to sense when thought has been applied to the point where the architect’s brow has been corrugated with the effort. And that sense is palpable here. It is an exceptional achievement on a modest budget.

PUBLIC SPACE

WINNER V&A East Storehouse, London E20

Diller, Scofidio +Renfro with Austin-Smith:Lord for The Victoria & Albert Museum

Publicly-accessible depository for the V&A’s collections in storage, set within the Here East building in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The items on display are spread over four floors, with a central rectangle cut out to form a grand hall.

It may be eccentric, contrarian even, to give this award to something indoors. But to our mind this is a genuine public space. Other places have in recent years been called ‘London’s living room’, usually as a marketing gimmick or a sop to planners; the one at the top of the old City Hall was never known to host a single spontaneous visit from any ordinary Londoner. The Storehouse might, we feel, grow organically into the role and actually come to earn the title.

This is not a conventional museum where people come to study objects, nor a foyer where they gather as a prelude to business. It is a social space, a milling ground, a place for wandering and meandering that offers the prospect of serendipity. The central space, the Weston Collections Hall, is really a piazza, enticingly surrounded by galleries, and reached, in the manner of piazze, though a narrow passage. The sudden contrast is compelling, a piece of street theatre. The galleries are hung with variegated borders – façade panels from the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens, everyday items such as a Brompton bicycle, and behind them a cast of exotic imports ranging from the Kauffman Office by Frank Lloyd Wright to the Agra Colonnade and a vast stage cloth by Picasso. All in all it is a sort of hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden, planted for decorative impact.

The absence of labelling has a magical effect. Relieved of the need to be laden with meaning, the items become pure aesthetic forms. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. In this way it differs from most museums, which are vessels for precious objects, curated by theme and chronology. This one has more the feel of a high-end bazaar, where the total experience trumps the specifics. It is a place for surprising juxtapositions and chance encounters. If it resembles any museum, it is probably the Soane. With its striking oblique views cutting through floors, it has something of the same Piranesian enchantment.

ENGINEERING

WINNER Rafter Walk, Canada Dock, London SE16

Whitby Wood (Engineers), Asif Khan Studio (Architects) and Townshend Landscape Architects for British Land in Joint Venture with AustralianSuper.

140ft hardwood and steel boardwalk skirting the western side of Canada Dock in Rotherhithe, with newly-formed wetlands filling the space between the bridge and the dock edge.

Our winner this year is not a leviathan in the manner of last year’s HS2 railway viaduct. It is subtler but no less engaging. Its serpentine form calls to mind Hogarth’s line of beauty, signifying liveliness and activity. It is, in fact, curved in section as well as plan. And the projecting transverse beams are also curved, giving a suggestion of the upturned eaves of a pagoda. As a composition, it is rewarding in multiple dimensions.

The bridge is cleverly designed but not over-engineered. It is mercifully free of the ostentation that sometimes mars such pieces. The simplicity allows the structure to speak for itself. Its drama comes from its elegant natural form, its striking Canada Red colour and from its historical allusions to the deal porters who used wooden gangways to bring timber ashore when Canada Dock was a centre of the London timber trade.

This is design as placemaker. The bridge is a bold opening step towards delivery of a decade-long dock masterplan intended to create two million square feet of mixed-use development across fifty acres. We are reminded not just of Hogarth but of Turner, who in 1832 added a dramatic splash of red to a seascape of his at the Royal Academy, prompting a put-out Constable to say: ‘He has been here and fired a gun’. In a similar way, this dash of red at Canada Dock immediately gives a lift, providing a point of focus, interest and animation. But also, as Constable said, it is a marker laid down, a challenge, a catalyst, adding to the sense that something is happening with more to come.

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