RIBA Awards Group chair Simon Henley introduces the final hopefuls for the Stirling Prize itself, revealing socially ambitious and ethically responsible projects
Every year in choosing the shortlist for the RIBA Stirling Prize we remember the significance and incredible variety of work made by the great British 20th-century architect James Stirling. This year the Stirling Prize shortlist includes a London Underground line, a national art gallery, council-led housing, an inclusive rural retreat and two major regeneration projects. As always, it’s been an incredibly difficult task to whittle the list down to six in a process that involves numerous project visits, many day-long meetings and a huge amount of preparation by the RIBA Awards team. These buildings (and many others in the process) will have been visited at least twice, once by the Regional Jury and again by members of the Awards Group.
The King’s Cross masterplan has been 20 years in the making; by comparison the mammoth Kubrick-inspired Elizabeth Line took just 12. The first, in reinventing a former industrial wasteland in the heart of London, does what few masterplans do. It concerns itself with the spaces between buildings. The second connects the far reaches of our capital city and every stop greets us with grandeur and dignity. The sheer scale of these two may physically dwarf the other contenders but the architectural, environmental and social ambition is equal in them all.
Motivated by frustration at the standard of wheelchair-accessible holiday accommodation, Wraxall Yard takes a dilapidated farmyard and turns it into a court, and in so doing elevates ruinous agricultural buildings to create an inclusive and accessible rural retreat. But with the practice of architecture being predominantly urban it also reminds us of the value of our rural buildings and their role in the landscape.
The terraced houses at Chowdhury Walk are ingenious in plan, carefully detailed and situated in a wonderful landscape, once a backland garage site of a type which abounds in our towns and cities. Meanwhile the National Portrait Gallery has become a better public building – first by having adopted a previously undervalued urban space and reorientated the building to it, and internally, through conservation, adaptation, intervention and connection it has extended the public interior.
Park Hill Phase 2 is the second instalment in the regeneration of Europe’s largest listed structure, originally designed by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith of Sheffield’s City Architect's Department. Where the first phase reimagined the 1950s estate this has preserved more, and amplified the original.
Four out of six involve the adaptive reuse and conservation of buildings which is, I think, a first. And each of the six demonstrates in the profoundest sense social purpose and civic ambition.
Simon Henley is a director of Henley Halebrown and RIBA Awards Group chair
See all six projects shortlisted for the 2024 RIBA Stirling Prize