Notes to editors
1. For further information and images contact Beatrice Cooke in the RIBA Press Office, 020 7307 3813 or beatrice.cooke@inst.riba.org
Images of award-winning buildings can be downloaded from this site:
http://www.architecture.com/NewsAndPress/PressImageLibrary/2010/Home.aspx
Username: pressimages
Password: press2010
2. 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.
3. The RIBA is grateful to UK Trade and Investment for supporting the RIBA Lubetkin Prize presentation at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
4. 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; the Royal Gold Medal; International and Honorary Fellowships and a full programme of lectures, exhibitions, tours and other events; and an education programme.
UK Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010
Shanghai, China
Architect: Heatherwick Studio
Client: UK Trade & Investment
Contractor: Mace International
Structural Engineer: Adams Kara Taylor
Environmental Engineer: Atelier Ten
Contact Value: £13.5m
Date of Occupation: May 2010
Gross internal area: 1500 sq m
60,000 fibre optic rods each 7.5 meters long, each containing a seed make up the Seed Cathedral. The pavilion showcases Britain as a place worth investing in or visiting. It was also required to be both iconic and practical.
By day it resembles a giant sea urchin whose spines act suck the daylight inside; by night with the light sources activated it glows and entices visitors in.
What is so special about it is the way the outside is carried through to the inside, it’s one idea, one material and all the more powerful for that: the building is its content, thus obviating the common problem of exhibition buildings: nice building, shame about the contents. This is low-tech, colourless and silent: an understated statement about Britain.
Timberyard Social Housing
Cork Street, Dublin, Ireland
Architect: O’Donnell + Tuomey
Client: Dublin City Council
Contractor: Townlink Construction
Structural Engineer: Downes Associates
Services Engineer: Buro Happold
Contact Value: €12.5m
Date of Occupation: September 2009
Area: 3807 sq m
When a small tear was made in the urban fabric of Dublin by the construction of the Coombe by-pass, O’Donnell + Tuomey came up with a way of repairing it with a highly modulated wall of housing that is almost Byker-like in its form and impact. The sculptural wall is broken up with deep-set windows or blind cuts, by set-backs to create terraces and by the vertical use of Iroko timber in screens. The building line cranks to hug the street and at ground level and there are built-in granite planters-cum-seats.
The main communal space is an open-ended triangular wedge, passively surveyed by the residents whose flats overlook it. Children can play here happily and safely just metres from a busy main road. These are grown-up spaces to grow up in.
Anchorage Museum at the Rasmuson Center
Anchorage, Alaska, USA
Architect: David Chipperfield Architects
Architect of Record: Kumin Associates
Client: Anchorage Museum at the Rasmuson Center
Contractor: Alcan General
Structural Engineer: Magnusson Klemencic Associates
Structural Engineer of Record: BBFM Engineers
Services Engineer: Affiliated Engineers NW and RSA Engineering
Facade Consultant: WJ Higgins and Associates
Contact Value: $39, 705,000
Date of Occupation: May 2009
Gross internal area: 8,404 sq m
David Chipperfield Architects’ latest American building, with its vertically fritted mirror glass facade it looks like rectilinear blocks of ice cut from the mountains that loom over the city of Anchorage.
Glass forms an apparently seamless skin, though there are movement joints aplenty, both horizontal and vertical, in this the most seismically active state in the Union. It covers 100% of the facades but is only 30% transparent.
The old building is now connected intimately to the new one at ground and first floor levels so that the displays are given a logical coherence.
Seldom has a new piece of architecture so transformed not only the building it extends and makes sense of, but the city it graces.