The National Railway Museum and Malcolm Reading Consultants revealed the final concepts for the new Central Hall, created by five small to medium-sized international and UK practices. Shortlisted in November 2019, the 5 teams include a collaboration between 6a architects from UK and OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen from Belgium, Atelier d’Architecture Philippe Prost from France, Carmody Groarke from the UK, Feilden Fowles from the UK, and Heneghan Peng Architects from Ireland.
Zaha Hadid Architects partnered up with Southbank Tower, for the company's first interior refurbishment project, in order to renovate the building’s lobby. The office structure, designed by Richard Seifert in 1972, had already gone through massive renovation works, led by KPF in 2015.
Designed by Kieran McGonigle and Aidan McGrath, House Lessans, has been named RIBA House of the Year 2019. The most prestigious prize given to the UK’s best new architect-designed house has been awarded this year to a simple home located in County Down, built on the site of a former farmstead.
RIBA announced the 2020 RIBA International Prize jury and stated that it will be led by French architect and urban planner Odile Decq with the participation of Es Devlin, Jeanne Gang, Rossana Hu, and Gustavo Utrabo.
The Tamayouz Excellence Award has revealed its shortlist of finalists for Women in Architecture and Construction 2019, given to emerging female contributors in the architectural and construction field throughout the Near East and North Africa. This annual award honors 2 categories, Rising Star and Woman of Outstanding Achievement, and the winners will be announced next month.
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The architectural practice Hawkins\Brown has been granted planning permission for the Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Building (IBRB) at the University of Warwick. Expected to open in 2020, the facility will set new standards in the campus with the quality of its architecture and interior flexible spaces.
With a very bold and pioneering move, the UK for the first time is prioritizing cyclists and pedestrians. The city is making pressures on skyscrapers by issuing new rules on the design of the high-rises in order to prevent the creation of wind tunnels.
The Global Climate Strike is set to happen on the 20th of September 2019, just before the UN emergency climate summit, where people will disrupt their work to protest and advocate for actions against climate breakdown. Architects are joining on the march, through “Architects Advocate”, a movement encouraging the professionals of the industry to stand in solidarity with the rally.
The showpiece of a planned new development at Edinburgh Park will be UK-artist David Mach’s first-ever building, named “Mach 1” by the project’s developers and investors, Parabola. Working with Stirling Prize-nominated architects Dixon Jones, Mach’s building will be created from over 30 shipping containers - but not in the modular, linear method to which shipping container buildings typically lend themselves. Instead its sculptural shape is meant to draw attention to the new quarter and catch the public’s eye, especially those traveling by on the nearby tram.
New London Architecture has published the results of their annual Tall Building Survey. Now in its sixth year, the report declares 2019 as “The Year of the Tall Building” with a record number of 76 tall buildings set to be completed in the UK capital in 2019.
Among the key findings from the report, it was revealed that the completion of tall buildings is set to be three times higher than in 2018. There are currently 541 tall buildings in the pipeline for the capital, with 22 out of London’s 33 boroughs containing tall buildings under construction. These tall buildings will offer more than 110,000 new homes for a city with chronic housing shortages.
The Royal Institute of British Architects has announced the foundation of a new award focused on recognizing work in housing in the UK. The award is named in memory of Neave Brown, the British architect, and designer famed for his many housing estates in London.
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The MK:U International Design Competition seeks world-class design teams for a new model university in the Oxford to Cambridge innovation arc.
Beloved by architects as the most original and successful of the mid-twentieth century’s wave of ‘New Towns’, and famously ‘different by design’, Milton Keynes (MK) has successfully reinvented itself as a ‘Smart City’ and is a key contributor to the United Kingdom’s knowledge economy.
This success has highlighted the need for a university — MK is the largest urban area in the UK without its own university — and to resolve this, MKC and Cranfield University, a global leader for postgraduate
British architect John Pawson is to be recognized for his services to design and architecture by the Queen, receiving a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2019 New Years Honours.
Venturi Scott-Brown’s National Gallery Sainsbury Wing extension (1991) was born into a precarious no-man’s land between the warring camps of neo-Modernists and traditionalists who had been tussling over the direction of Britain’s cities for much of the prior decade. The site of the extension had come to be one of the most symbolic battlefields in British architecture since a campaign to halt its redevelopment with a Hi-Tech scheme by Ahrends Burton Koralek had led to that project’s refusal at planning in 1984.
Grimshaw can claim their horticultural Eden Project in Devon, South West England as being among their most iconic works. Nestled in a disused quarry, simultaneously acting as an embedded landscape feature and an alien spacecraft holding precious specimens and plants, the scheme has been celebrated as a successful modern interpretation of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome concept.
Having been speculated upon both in Qingdao, China, and loosely on the Planet Mars, the Architects Journal reports that Grimshaw has begun work on a new £100 million Eden Centre in Morecambe, on England’s north-west coast.
They say that bad publicity is good publicity. Nevertheless, late August is a time for baited breath among UK architects, as the readers of Building Design generate the shortlist for Britain’s "ugliest" building. Beauty is certainly in the eye of the beholder and judgment towards these unpopular designs shouldn't necessarily be generalized. However, this competition opens up important dialogues about architectural aesthetics and public reception of new projects.
Continuing the 12-year tradition of what has been called the RIBA Stirling Prize’s less fortunate sibling, the shortlist for the 2018 Carbuncle Cup showcases the six projects which British architecture followers love to hate. Previous winners of the prize include the Cutty Sark by Grimshaw in 2012, and Rafael Viñoly Architects' 20 Fenchurch Street in 2015.
