Stock Orchard Street, London, a 'green' residential project beside the busy rail approach to King's Cross Station, designed by Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, has scooped this year's RIBA Sustainability Award supported by the SCHÜCO. The house is occupied by the architect. The announcement was made tonight at a special awards ceremony for The RIBA Stirling Prize in association with The Architects' Journal at the Old Billingsgate Market in the City of London.
RIBA Sustainability Award supported by the SCHÜCO rewards the building which demonstrates most elegantly and durably the principles of sustainable architecture.
Sarah Wigglesworth was presented with a cheque for £5,000.
The judges said:
"Stock Orchard Street is an urban oasis created within one of the most hostile urban environments one could imagine, beside the busy rail approach to King's Cross Station. The form, function and architectural expression of each element has both responded to the site constraints at the same time as creating an original composition from a variety of low-cost materials: gabions of concrete rubble; straw bales; corrugated clear plastic or steel sheeting; and sandbags (actually containing a dry cement mix). This is one of the few occasions where the constituent parts of many different low impact buildings have been assembled to achieve an inspirational sequence of interior spaces – that transcend their original functional raison d'etre and become architecture of the highest quality, at the same time as achieving low overall carbon emissions for buildings of this size and complexity. The judges felt that the lack of visible renewable energy technology was more than compensated for by the live/work concept, and sound passive design strategies – and felt this approach shows how low environmental impact architecture can genuinely provide a higher quality of life and pioneer a fresh aesthetic.
"This eccentric project, much discussed in the media, combines a wing of offices (for the architects) with a large domestic wing, through which pokes by a five storey library tower topped with look-out-cum-reading-room; all this set in a garden where food is grown. The project is not only a pragmatic solution to immediate needs – somewhere to live and work – but also a research-led programme in which new ideas, materials and forms could be tried out.
"The building, which featured in the first series of Channel 4's Grand Designs, can be seen as an experiment, an exercise or a series of gestures. A plethora of contemporary initiatives are contained within and without: green issues, sustainability, raw material, building with loose stones, straw, cement bags, re-cycled materials, avoidance of bourgeois elegance, avoidance of high finish etc.
"The architects are interested in the relationship between architecture and the everyday. So the design is relaxed and playful enough to be able to accommodate the vicissitudes and the fun of everyday life. Most of the unusual techniques and materials are not used because they are novel but because they are cheap and accessible: what is novel is the idea of using them in this way and in this context. In the end the architects of Stock Orchard Street probably would claim not to care about elegance of composition or organisation. And it works of course. It is a big building and the living spaces are highly useable. Indeed, were it an old building it would best be described as rambling and at certain times it does even recall the atmosphere, and even the physiognomy, of a rambling old manor farmhouse of the English tradition.
"This is very much a work in progress: it took two years for the library tower to be fitted out and a seemingly random first floor projection is in fact the docking station for a yet-to-be-realized mobile guest pod to be parked across the garden when not in use. This is a house full of ideas, full of experiment and full of magic. The environmental design approach was not generally driven by quantitative calculation but evolved as much through considered instinct as through strict rules. What has surprised – and shut up – its earlier critics, is its practicality and its remarkable performance-in-use figures, which the architects only got round to producing for this award, when it was possible to provide not forecasts of energy use ones based on two years of use. The polemic impact of the design was equally important in that it aimed to raise the level of the debate about sustainability. Judging by the positive press coverage it has certainly succeeded in this aim.
"This scheme represents a challenge to the Classical or Modernist strictures on language or consistency perhaps. But it is most important as an initiative which challenges the complacency of programme and manners, of most London buildings."
Stock Orchard Street beat off competition from three other buildings:
1. Beaufort Court, Kings Langley, Hertfordshire – Studio E Architects
2. Davidson Building, London – Lifschutz Davidson
3. Limerick County Hall, Limerick, Ireland – Bucholz McEvoy.