出處
Why this year's Stirling prize is cooler than ever
Strange but true: every one of the graceful buildings on 2008's shortlist looks better suited to ice-cold climes than Britain
July 18, 2008 2:00 PM
This year's Stirling prize, an award made by the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architects' Journal, and turned into a TV makeover show by Channel 4, has gone all very Nordic this year.
The shortlist of six announced last night for the building that has made the "greatest contribution to British architecture this year" is made up entirely of designs that have something of the North Sea, the Baltic and ice and snow about them. They are all, if not exactly hip, rather cool.
The restoration of the Royal Festival Hall by Allies and Morrison on London's South Bank is one of the six. Here is a much respected public building that has always felt more than a little Scandinavian, a building echoing something of the design ethos of the famous Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 yet formed on the banks of the Thames by the architects of the London County Council in time for the 1951 Festival of Britain. From the inside, the RFH feels rather like a stylish 1950s cruise ship, and if the view from its great north-facing windows was of Stockholm, the Norwegian fjords or of the harbour at Helsinki, where similar buildings, like the Palace Hotel dating from much the same time, can be found, it wouldn't come as such a very big surprise.
The Allies and Morrison renovation is generally very good, although the South Bank Centre really does need to remove the distracting and demeaning row of temporary shops and chain cafes shoved up at the base of this handsome, ship-like building before it can be considered worthy of a national award.
The Manchester Civil Justice Centre, another of the six shortlisted designs, is by the Australian architects Denton, Corker and Marshall from sunny Sydney. Their super-cool and inventive high-rise law courts feels anything but Sydney and "sunny", although in the context of the mostly dreary new buildings around it, it's certainly a breath of fresh architectural air.
The Westminster Academy, set alongside London's elevated A40(M) Westway, by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris has something of the same cool, rational look about it; again, it would be just as happy in a Scandinavian city as it is in London. So, too, would the Accordia housing development on the fringe of Cambridge, where new, high-density homes designed by Alison Brooks Architects, Feilden Clegg Bradley and Macreanor Lavington have been built; if I had never seen this scheme and someone had told me Accordia was in Denmark or Sweden, I think I would have believed them.
Nicholas Grimshaw's lively Amsterdam Bijlmer Arena railway station is quite at home with all that low-key, if often colourful modern Dutch architecture, currently spreading like a rash across England as well as the Netherlands, while Zaha Hadid's glorious Nord Park Cable Railway stations and bridges connecting Innsbruck with the mountain village, and Alpine views, of Hungerburg, exist in a world covered by snow for a goodly part of the year. You can stop off on the way to visit Europe's highest zoo and its enthralling collection of arctic and other habitually northern animals.
At its best, modern British architecture has been much influenced by the intelligent humanism of the most gently articulate and highly persuasive Scandinavian design. It was Alvar Aalto, the inspired Finnish architect, who brought subtle curves, craftsmanship and nature in touch with the right-angled strictures of modern architecture and design from the mid-1930s; his is a lesson that still needs learning in so many British towns and cities.
The Stirling shortlist, an interesting one, offers some hope; here, for the most part, are buildings that play down the current obsession with "iconic" design (for which read: over-the-top, theatrical, histrionic) and offer us something of the humane grace of Nordic modernism.
As for the award ceremony itself, a cringe-making, slap-up awards dinner broadcast from Liverpool? Well, real architecture outlasts such awkward and embarrassing trials.
