This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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This year I have devoted much more attention than usual to the process of selection for the Stirling Prize. This is partly because last year, to my surprise, the small extension we added to our holiday cottage in remote north Wales was the joint winner of the Royal Society of Architecture in Wales’s Welsh Architecture Awards in spite of the fact that it does not look like much more than a corrugated iron hut (actually, the material is called Onduline and was used to build chapels in hot climates across the British Empire).

In theory, this should have meant that it was eligible to be considered as part of the longlist for last year’s Stirling Prize, but none of the three Welsh projects made it on to the shortlist. Perhaps this was because they were deemed to be not of sufficient quality (one of the three was a Maggie’s Centre by Dow Jones, a well-respected London practice) or because the majority of the projects chosen were in convenient range of Norman Foster’s helicopter in a year when it was difficult for judges to travel too far from the RIBA.

This year, no less than four of the six projects are in London. This could reflect the challenges of construction in the capital, but it has the unfortunate effect of suggesting that everything worthwhile in British architecture is within bicycling distance of Shoreditch.

The first project shortlisted is an elaborate re-working of an existing office block, 100, LIVERPOOL STREET, in Broadgate, by Hopkins Architects, who were long ago responsible for the new Opera House at Glyndebourne and now mostly do high-prestige work for universities internationally, including the Stephen Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in Oxford, which is as close to being neoclassical as any modern architect will allow.

100 Liverpool Street has probably been included because retrofitting is currently (and rightly) a preoccupation of architects who are under pressure to redevelop existing buildings instead of just knocking them down. It is a sophisticated piece of corporate retooling.

The second London project is the HACKNEY NEW PRIMARY SCHOOL AND 333, KINGSLAND ROAD by Henley Halebrown, a currently fashionable practice whose tower block with round-headed windows in Fulham was recently approved by Stuart Andrew, now departed as Housing Minister.

Their Hackney project is described in the press release as “an immense sculptural pink brute of a building” which is odd because its most conspicuous feature is that it is a uniform dark brick red. It is one of a very small number of genuinely contemporary buildings that has earned a place in Owen Hatherley’s Modern Buildings in Britain, where it is dated 2019 and the accompanying block of flats facing on to the street is described as “one part Bologna, one part Alton Estate”.

The third of the London projects is an £80 million MULTISTOREY HOUSING BLOCK by Panter Hudspith, just south of the Elephant and Castle. It takes the current standard London vernacular of brick-clad blocks and plays games with the overall composition, introducing a small element of variety to what can otherwise be a depressingly standardised architectural form. This works well in the way that it joins the adjacent streets, although hard to appreciate except in photographs.

The fourth London project is smaller and herbivorous — the SANDS END ARTS AND COMMUNITY CENTRE by a park in Parsons Green. It is by Alex Ely of Mae Architects, a firm whose motto is “Uplifting human spirits for the long term”. I like it: it’s a nice, low-key, well considered project, full of green-stained timber and daylight with a café looking out onto the local park; but I can’t quite see it winning.

Then, there are two projects outside London. The first is a new building for FORTH VALLEY COLLEGE in Falkirk by Reiach and Hall, an Edinburgh practice who were responsible for the lovely extension to the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness and, more recently, the extension to the Fruitmarket Art Gallery in Edinburgh.

It is right that the RIBA looks kindly on educational projects because the quality of the environment where people learn is important, and so much effort and funding has been spent over the last twenty years on designing and upgrading local authority educational buildings. This looks like a thoughtful, well-designed project, with clean lines and a clear layout and I am sympathetic to the jury’s comment that “This is a building that knew where it needed money and an architect and client working in harmony to make sure it got it”.

The final project in the shortlist is in Cambridge and belongs to a totally different culture. It is Niall McLaughlin’s beautifully designed and detailed LIBRARY AT MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, which manages to fit in to an impossibly difficult site with extreme integrity.

This is not Falkirk and judges may be against it as a result, feeling that it belongs to a world of rarefied institutional privilege instead of democratic state provision. But if one is to judge architecture as an art form, looking for a place in the history books, then this is the project that should win. Although I would not place money on it.