Celebrating its tenth year of promoting the very best in British architecture, the Stirling Prize will be awarded live on Channel 4 on Saturday 15th October. 2004 was a vintage year for the prize, with the high profile and deserved winner of 30 St Mary Axe, aka the Gherkin (pictured, left). The 2005 shortlist of six is enough to brighten my gloomiest architectural day, and I can honestly say that I’d be happy for any of the candidate buildings to win. The bookmakers favourite is apparently the Jubilee Library in Brighton which is, according to Jonathan Glancey in the Guardian, that very rare bird - a Private Finance Initiative building that actually works and is beautiful.
A surprising omission from the final shortlist was the Sage Gateshead, Norman Foster’s graceful armadillo of a symphony hall on the Tyne. Eliminated in the first round of inspections by the judges, perhaps the presence of the Stirling Prize-winning Gateshead Millennium Bridge just next door prevented the ever-exciting Newcastle/Gateshead from taking a shot at the top architectural prize again so soon; perhaps the category of ‘brilliant new building for an important institution’ had already been allocated in the shortlist to Eric Mirralles’s confusingly wonderful Scottish Parliament building; or perhaps Norman Foster is only allowed one nomination, and his admittedly superlative McLaren Technology Centre was thought to merit greater recognition. After all, industrial design can use all the encouragement it can get.
Plaudits are due to Channel 4 for providing the prize with something approaching the media profile it deserves; following on from last year’s precedent the winner will be announced live on air towards the end of a programme that consistently demonstrates just how well contemporary architecture works on television.
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Posted by: Cheap Jordan 1 | October 01, 2011 at 05:51 AM