A Norwich council estate of low-rise brick terraces has won this year’s Stirling Prize, British architecture’s most prestigious award.
It might surprise some people that council housing is being built in the UK at all, but this is a sensitive, sustainable and elegant social scheme on the eastern edge of Britain.
The estate is a very different winner from last year’s £1bn Bloomberg Building, the City of London’s most expensive office block, embodying a shift in priorities — and recognition of the depth of the UK’s housing crisis.
Designed by architects Mikhail Riches and Cathy Hawley, the hundred houses of Goldsmith Street are the result of Norwich council cleverly negotiating rules that were designed by the Thatcher government to stop councils reinvesting the proceeds of right-to-buy council housing sales to build new housing. They are 100 per cent council built and owned, making them a rarity.
The brick-built houses, street and gardens are on the scale of Victorian terraces but the language is contemporary, with curving corners and elegant window reveals. They have clearly become very popular with the street’s residents and are a vindication of both the council’s and the architects’ decision to eschew the apartment block slabs that one might have expected to be the outcome of such a project.
Built to the exacting Passivhaus standards, the very rigorous German regulations for environmental performance, the houses are super-insulated and energy efficient, apparently leading to a 70 per cent reduction in fuel bills for tenants.
Goldsmith Street beat another interesting environmentally sustainable building, the Cork House in Eton, to the prize. Designed by Matthew Barnett Howland, Dido Milne and Oliver Wilton, the low-slung, ziggurat-roofed house suggests cork can do much more than merely stopper bottles. Bottles were also involved in another contender, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners’ green-roofed Macallan Distillery and Visitor Experience at Moray.
Also shortlisted was Witherford Watson Mann’s intelligent repurposing of a stable block into the Nevill Holt Opera House, Feilden Fowles’ Weston gallery and visitor centre at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the undeniably impressive rebuilding of London Bridge Station with its remarkable vaulted public areas by Grimshaw.
This is the first time a social housing project has won the Stirling Prize and it is an award that, a couple of weeks before the release of the report into the Grenfell Tower tragedy, seems designed to send a message about a long-neglected area of architecture.
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October 09, 2019 at 03:02AM
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Stirling Prize won by Norwich council estate - Financial Times
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