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RIBA announces the 2019 Stirling Prize shortlist

Six in the Mix

RIBA announces the 2019 Stirling Prize shortlist

The Macallan Distillery and Visitor Experience (Joas Souza)

Today, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) announced their six projects shortlisted for the 2019 Stirling Prize, an annual award given to the U.K.‘s most stellar new structure.

The nominated schemes include two residential projects: the Cork House, an adaptive reuse of a historic mill building designed by Matthew Barnett Howland with Dido Milne and Oliver Wilton for themselves, that, as its name suggests, is made almost entirely of cork (pictured below).

Cork House (Ricky Jones)

The other is Goldsmith Street in Norwich, England, a seven-block development of row houses with traditional massing and Passivhaus certification. The project, pictured below, was executed by architect Mikhail Riches with Cathy Hawley, while MPH Architects (along with a team that included The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL and Arup) completed Cork House.

A brick building complex with a sloped roof
Goldsmith Street (Tim Crocker)

 

A long flat building with the sky above
The Weston at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (Peter Cook)

On the public-facing side, three cultural projects made the list this year. London’s Feilden Fowles Architects delivered the Weston, a new visitor center and gallery for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, an open-air museum founded in 1977 on an 18th-century estate. The stretched-out structure’s facade is made of concrete mixed from local aggregates and banded out to create a sedimentary rock–like effect.

A low-slung flat building with a bulge in the middle
The Macallan Distillery and Visitor Experience (Mark Power)

Meanwhile, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners dreamed up a visitor center for a very different client, pictured above and at top. Macallan, the scotch producer, received a distillery tour facility in Moray, Scotland, with a wild timber gridshell roof that connects to the property’s 18th-century laird’s home.

The interior of a subdued opera house
Nevill Holt Opera (Hélène Binet)

At a smaller scale, London’s Witherford Watson Mann Architects hid the Nevill Holt Opera in the yard between existing historic stables. On the inside, the arrangement of the hall’s cladding dialogues with the stable joists behind the structure, and the pattern reinforces a scheme to make young singers’ voices more resonant.

Rounding out the list is the largest project, Grimshaw’s almost 930,000-square-foot London Bridge regional rail station, which enlarged the main concourse but preserved original Victorian arches elsewhere in the building.

Photo of a rail station with timber-clad interior
London Bridge Station (Paul Raftery)

Last year, the Stirling Prize went to Foster + Partners’ Bloomberg project, the London headquarters for the American financial and media company founded by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Like in years prior, this year’s shortlist will be, according to RIBA ” judged against a range of criteria including design vision; innovation and originality; capacity to stimulate, engage and delight occupants and visitors; accessibility and sustainability; how fit the building is for its purpose and the level of client satisfaction.”

The 2019 winners will be announced at a ceremony on October 8.

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