Notes to editors

• For further information and images contact Lorna Gemmell in the RIBA Press Office, 020 7307 3761 or lorna.gemmell@inst.riba.org
   
  
• The prize is named in honour of Berthold Lubetkin, the Georgia-born architect who worked in Paris before coming to London in the 1930s to establish the influential Tecton Group. He is best known for the two Highpoint apartment blocks in Highgate and the Penguin Pool at London Zoo.
   
  
• The Architectural Review is an international magazine about the art of architecture, which is sold in more than 130 countries. It is concerned with finding the best contemporary architecture world-wide, to set it within the contexts of theory, history and technology, and against complementary disciplines such as landscape and urban planning, interior and product design. Founded in 1896, The Architectural Review has always been committed to the broad principle of ecological sustainability, and to the belief that architecture, far from being an autonomous art, is a discipline dedicated to improving people's lives.
   
  
• The RIBA Trust manages the cultural assets of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), including the internationally recognised collections of the British Architectural Library. It is the UK's national architecture centre, delivering the RIBA Awards and RIBA Stirling Prize (live on Channel 4); the Royal Gold Medal; International and Honorary Fellowships; Architecture Week (with Arts Council England and the Architecture Centre Network); a full programme of lectures, exhibitions, tours and other events; and an education programme.
   
  
• Architecture Week, the annual celebration of contemporary architecture, takes place from 14-26 June 2007. Full details are at www.architectureweek.org.uk. Over 800 events are taking place throughout the country. Architecture Week is organised and managed by Arts Council England and is an Arts Council England and Royal Institute of British Architects joint initiative, in association with the Architecture Centre Network. For further information contact Dorelia Adeane in the RIBA Press Office on 020 7307 3884 or dorelia.adeane@inst.riba.org
   
  
• The Architecture Review is Media Partners for the International Awards. The Architects' Journal is Media Partner and Faststream and Ibstock are Associate Sponsors for the RIBA National and European Awards. Hobs Reprographics are Supporters of the RIBA National Awards.
   
  
• The cast concrete Lubetkin Trophy is designed and made by artist Petr Weigl. For more information on his work go to www.petrweigl.com
   
  
• Citations for the three Lubetkin Prize shortlisted buildings follow:
   
  Southern Cross Station, Melbourne, Australia by Grimshaw (working within the Grimshaw Jackson Joint Venture)
   
  Architect: Grimshaw (working within the Grimshaw Jackson Joint Venture)
  Client: Leighton Contractors and Civic Nexus
  Engineer: Winward Structures
  Quantity surveyor: DCWC & Leighton Contractors
  Services: Lincolne Scott Australia
  Environmental: Advanced Environmental Concepts
  Rail Infrastructure: Maunsell Australia
  Signalling: GHD
  DDA: Blythe Saunderson
  Security: Honeywell
  Acoustics: Marshall Day
  Roof Shop Detailing: Precision Design
  Contractor: Leighton Contractors
  Contract value: unknown
  Date of completion: December 2006
  Gross internal area: 60,000 sq m
   
  This project involves far more than the covering of vast spaces, it involves the stitching together of a large part of the city, linking the central business district with the reviving docklands and regenerating a couple of urban blocks at the same time. A tall order then. It could be said that the architects have made it even harder for themselves by enclosing all the tracks, creating the problem of how to ventilate a station filled with diesel fumes (all the mainline trains run on diesel because of the distances they have to cover). They have risen to this challenge brilliantly with a roof made up of a series of domes so placed as to funnel the prevailing winds and disperse the fumes drawn out of the shed by Venturi caps. Given these winds, it also takes a lot to hold the roof down, so architects and engineers have come up with a complex structure which braces the roof east-west as well as north-south. In fact, far from making a rod for their own backs, the architects were responding to another part of the brief: to create an urban space in the city. And as well as being a destination, it is also a route: linking the trams on Spencer Street with the Telstra Dome.
   
  Materially the roof is a sandwich of steel laced with pillows of ETFE (as at Grimshaw's Eden Project) instead of heavy glass (as at Waterloo Station). These admit just enough diffused daylight while retaining some of the mystery and excitement of train travel - this is not an airport after all.
   
  Unlike Foster's Dresden Station, the architects had little to work with. This was an undistinguished station which forced passengers to tunnel their way under the tracks – which few women did after dark. The new station not only makes people feel safer by elevating them above the trains, it also engenders pride in their city and its rail system. And it might do much to encourage Australians back on to the train - making this the greenest of its many green credentials.
   
  Des Moines Public Library, Iowa, USA by David Chipperfield Architects
   
  Architect: David Chipperfield Architects
  Architect of Record: Herbert Lewis Kruse Blunck Architecture Client: Des Moines Public Library
  Structural Engineer: Jane Wernick Associates
  Services Engineer: Arup
  Façade Consultant: WJ Higgins & Associates, Inc.
  Contractor: The Weitz Company
  Contract value: $22.5m
  Date of completion: April 2006
  Gross internal area: 13,500 sq m
   
  This is an exceptionally 'direct' building. A concept – a diagram almost – is developed in the most direct way possible into built form. A shape is traced on the ground that derives from the city block (the right angle) that stretches out into the park (the diagonal) and is extended vertically as a two storey building. Concrete floor plates follow the shape – there are no spatial gymnastics. The green roof is flat with no rooflights.
   
  The architecture and detail are developed with extreme rationality and simplicity. Internally, lighting and services are expressed. Facades are a systematic panelled skin of perforate copper and glass. The directness of the building, its unswerving development from diagram to built form is what gives the project its real strength and profundity. The concept is clear, the elaboration absolutely no more than it needs to be.
   
  And yet this is still a scheme which has developed over the gestation of the project. The initial concept did not include the copper mesh - the most eye-catching aspect of the delivered design. This arose as much out of the environmental strategy as from any aesthetic considerations, beautiful though it is. The copper reduces solar gain in the building but it also, of course, cuts out light, meaning that the building has to be artificially lit throughout the day. However on a sunny day it is comfortably cool sitting in one of the many chairs scattered around the perimeter, something which could not be done in many glazed buildings. Another aspect to the project which is not easily read from the outside (because the copper covers the entire building, glazed and concrete) is that 30% of the building's skin is solid, helping it to comply with (the none-too stringent) energy saving regulations. These areas are mainly confined to the building's backstage areas.
   
  Another thing which has changed about the design is that the corners were originally designed as curves not right-angles. Although a cost-saving exercise, the result is an improvement, adding an appropriate crispness to the building.
   
  
  Hearst Tower, New York, USA by Foster & Partners
   
  Architect: Foster & Partners
  Client: Hearst Corporation
  Associate Architect: Adamson Associates & Gensler
  Development Manager: Tishman Speyer
  Structural Engineer: WSP Cantor Seinuk
  Services / MEP: Flack + Kurtz
  Lighting: George Sexton Associates & Kugler Associates Food Service: Beer Associates
  Contractor: Turner Construction Company
  Contract value: confidential
  Date of completion: October 2006
  Gross internal area: 80,000 sq m
   
  The Hearst Tower is to NYC what the Gherkin is to London. This is to say that within the orthogonal universe of the standard 'down town' office building, the Hearst triangle or the Gherkin curve are immediately recognisable. For the moment, as a result of the extreme contrast with the existing fabric, these buildings take on an extra significance. In the traditional city they are not unlike the profile of a cathedral or a place of public importance. With the current and rapacious appetite for signature, landmark and/or icon buildings, the Hearst Tower will no doubt become less distinct and will either join an urban landscape of poor copies, as with the progeny of the Seagram building and Lever House a half century earlier, or it will take its place in an accelerating game of architectural one-upmanship. In any event the Hearst Tower has raised the bar in terms of formal expectation and this has been refreshingly achieved by a rational schema.
   
  The tower ends abruptly. If it had been 10 to 20 storeys taller its proportions would have been better. However with the assertion of the dia-grid as the primary reading, the floor levels are subsumed as texture and the building becomes relatively scale-less. It is the 1928 six storey original Hearst building that provides scale as well as a base to the tower above. Here the project takes on a surprising theatricality. As opposed to the anticipated solid base, the six storeys have been gutted and hollowed out providing, in a sense, a six storied public piazza. The building has been literally turned inside out – water falls, escalators and dramatically extended lift towers form the accompaniment to this unexpected public tour de force.
   
  The building uses an impressive 85% recycled steel, consumes 26% less energy than its more conventional neighbours and is the first new commercial building in the city to be given a gold rating under the US Green Buildings Council's leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) programme. The Americans have a lot to do to catch up with Europe in these terms, but once again Foster is leading the way.