Six of this year's finalists have been selected by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) jury from a list of National Award winners. After a very modest but unexpected victory for a truly civilian project (since then, however, has suffered financial collapse and sold, despite the protests of local residents, a foreign investor), last season of the Sterling Prize, this year only spectacular buildings that fully demonstrate the efforts and resources invested in them.
There is only one social object in the list - Storey's Field Community Center and Eddington Kindergarten bureau MUMA, however, it is part of a large-scale plan of the status customer - the University of Cambridge. The university implements a whole area of residential and academic development with a developed infrastructure
Northwest Cambridge, which will include, among other things, 1,500 apartments for sale, 1,500 apartments for university staff, housing for 2,000 undergraduates and graduate students. The scale and investment fully affected the quality of the project and implementation, including the material, which generally distinguishes all the finalists of this year.
The second common feature is the location in a not quite urban or completely natural environment, the exception here is only Bloomberg headquarters in the City of London Norman Foster Bureau. This is Foster's record 10th Sterling nomination, but the first in eleven years after the 2007 Dresden train station. It is also the first office building to be finalized in the past few years. It is distinguished by its large scale, a range of innovative eco-technologies,
a museumified Roman temple in the underground level and a budget of one billion pounds.
The Storey's Field Community Center is, oddly enough, the first site of this feature to claim the UK Building of the Year title. The second typological "newcomer" was Chadwick Hall student residence architects Henley Halebrown, built for the University of London's Rohampton and discreetly echoing the Georgian buildings next door. Housing for students previously made it to the finals only as part of large university complexes, where it played far from the first role.
Jewish cemetery in Bushey near London, Is the first necropolis to be nominated for the Sterling Prize. Its authors, Waugh Thistleton Architects, are known for their wooden structures, including multi-storey ones, but in this case they used no less experimental material, erecting a laconic earthen ensemble.
The new building of the Tate Gallery in St Ives by Jamie Fobert Architects and Evans & Shalev is submerged into a hillside on the Cornish coast. From the outside, it looks like a series of small volumes of glass, stone, concrete, ceramics with public spaces connecting the city and the sea. The key role in the interior is played by a spacious 30-meter-long exhibition hall with natural light through concrete floor beams.
Sultan Nazrin Shah Center, Auditorium for Worcester College at Oxford University, recalls with its forms and use of wood and stone another work of its authors, Níall McLaughlin Architects, -
the chapel of Bishop Edward King in the same area (it was nominated for the Stirling Prize in 2013).
