RIBA: The Latest Architecture and News

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced 7 projects as winners of the 2017 RIBA North West Regional Awards, with top prize of North West Building of the Year going to Foster + Partners’ Maggie’s at the Robert Parfett Building. These seven buildings will now continue on to compete in the RIBA National Awards, whose winners will make up the shortlist for the prestigious Stirling Prize.

“This year’s awards represent two parallel but linked trends. One is characterised by a dominant interest in the value of re-used existing buildings that benefit from regeneration. The other is the regenerative effect of new buildings themselves,” commented Graham Morrison, North West Regional Jury Chair.

“Though ‘ordinary’ buildings such as housing or offices are coming close to an award-winning level, they are, in their nature, ‘pathfinders’ and there is an understandable caution in their level of investment. This risk pattern favours the existing buildings that more obviously benefit from previous investment but when this caution is eclipsed by confidence, the truly exceptional emerges and this is evidenced by this year’s overall winner.” 

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The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has named 50 projects as winners of 2017 RIBA London Regional Awards, including the London Building of the Year, “Photography Studio for Juergen Teller” by 6a architects.

“The year has demonstrated once again the breadth of the capital’s architectural output at the very high level that the RIBA programme requires, and the juries took enormous pleasure in selecting a most exemplary set of schemes,” said Jury chair Matthew Lloyd.

Selected from a 85-strong shortlist, these 50 projects will now go on to compete in RIBA's National Awards program, the winners of which will create the shortlist for the RIBA Stirling Prize – the highest award for architecture in the UK.

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The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced 17 winning projects in the 2017 RIBA East Awards. Topped by Walters & Cohen Architects' Vajrasana Buddhist Retreat Centre in Suffolk which won the RIBA East Building of the Year Award, these 17 regional winners will go on to compete in RIBA's national awards, with the best in the national awards ultimately going forward to compete for the Stirling Prize.

"It was just fabulous to see the diversity and exceptional quality of buildings around the region," said RIBA East Regional Director Louise Todd. "The jury had a really difficult task in selecting the winners, which says a lot for the strength of the shortlist and the creativity of the architects involved."

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The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the first wave of their 2017 RIBA Regional Awards, beginning with the West Midlands region. Six projects were selected as winners from the region, which includes the city of Birmingham and its surrounding area.

“This year's winning projects prove that a good architecture should allow its user a space and time to absorb and to reflect,” commented Regional Jury Chair, Natalia Maximova. “The selected designs frame our experience of the buildings and spaces rather than dictate it. They highlight the fact that there is no true architecture without a clear vision and a strong concept. Originality remains a highly valued commodity and a source of inspiration for others and therefore should be recognised.

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A total of 85 buildings from the British capital have been shortlisted for the 2017 RIBA London Awards, including projects from Wilkinson Eyre, AHMM, Allies and Morrison, Herzog & de Meuron, and Rogers Stirk Harbour. All 85 buildings will now be visited and carefully assessed by one of four regional juries, before the regional winners are selected in June of this year. Winning projects will continue on to compete for the RIBA Stirling Prize - the UK's highest honor for architecture.

See a complete list of shortlisted buildings after the break.

Liverpool will soon be home to the Royal Institute of British Architect’s (RIBA) new national centre for architecture, RIBA North, which will be a new focal point for visitors to learn about architecture, as well as the culture and history behind Liverpool’s built environment. Occupying a part of the Mann Island Buildings designed by Broadway Malyan in 2013, RIBA North will offer a host of new opportunities for architectural discovery and education, including exhibitions, lectures, tours, and a digital model of the city.

“At RIBA North, we have a building with museum conditions which will offer a magnificent opportunity to view RIBA’s world-renowned historic collections showing hundreds of years of the UK’s extraordinary architectural history,” explained RIBA President Jane Duncan. “We are particularly proud to strengthen our cultural and creative offering in the north of England, and to enable many more people to explore and understand the enormous impact that architecture and design has on all our lives.”

Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios has been selected as the winners of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) competition to design the new Faculty of Arts Building at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, England. Lauded for its flexibility and collaboration-fostering design, the winning proposal was selected over finalist entries from Foster + Partners, Grimshaw, White Arkitekter and Wilkinson Eyre.

Last week, Richard Murphy Architects’ ‘Murphy House’ in Edinburgh was named the Royal Institute of British Architects’ 2016 RIBA House of the Year. Built into a hillside lot, the unusual site presented the architects with the opportunity to play, loading the house with an assortment of clever architectural details and mechanics, including a hidden bath in the master bedroom, folding walls, sliding bookshelf ladders and operable clerestory panels.

To capture all these moving parts in their full effect, the architect himself created a video walkthrough of the house. Check it out below.

Next year the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) will open a seminal new exhibition: Mies van der Rohe & James Stirling: Circling the Square. The show will examine two iconic schemes proposed for the same site in the City of London: Mies van der Rohe’s unrealised Mansion House Square project (developed by Lord Peter Palumbo) and its built successor, James Stirling Michael Wilford & Associates’ No.1 Poultry.

Last week, RIBA announced the first two homes shortlisted for this year's House of the Year Award: Antsy Plum by Coppin Dockray and Outhouse by Loyn & Co Architects. Antsy Plum is a 1960s modernist house located in Antsy, Wiltshire, renovated to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent; Outhouse, located in Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, is a partly subterranean concrete structure on a sloped site.

In celebration of their 10-year anniversary, Article 25, the world's largest architectural charity, will hold this year's "10x10 Drawing the City London" event on November 29 at the Royal Institute of British Architects. Each year, representatives from UK's top architecture studios and property and design industries gather to raise funds for Article 25's work in developing countries. The event features an auction of artwork by 100 prominent rising artists, designers, and architects; this year's participants include Kengo Kuma, Richard Meier, Antony Gormley, Zaha Hadid Design, and David Adjaye.

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The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the shortlist of six finalist projects in the running for the inaugural RIBA International Prize. The first RIBA Award open to any qualified architect in the world, the International Prize seeks to name the world’s “most significant and inspirational” building. Criteria for consideration include the demonstration of “visionary, innovative thinking and excellence of execution, whilst making a distinct contribution to its users and to its physical context.”

The six finalists were named from a longlist of 30 buildings, from which a further selection of 21 projects have been recognized by the jury for the RIBA Award for International Excellence. The jury has also named the winner of the RIBA International Emerging Architect prize recognizing “the achievement of architects in the earlier stages of their career who are working on global projects.”

The Grand Jury is lead by Richard Rogers and includes Billie Tsien, Kunlé Adeyemi, Philip Gumuchdjian, and Marilyn Jordan Taylor.

"Our panel of jurors have been particularly impressed by the way in which each building reacts to, resolves and assimilates into the varying geographies and contexts - from dense urban cities to a small town in the Arctic Circle," said RIBA President Jane Duncan on the naming of the finalists. "Each project resolves the complex demands of its context with ingenuity, exceptional detail and finishing and a sensitivity to the needs of the users and communities which will inhabit these spaces."