Is the Stirling becoming a prize ass?
The Stirling prize 2017 shortlist displays a woeful lack of adventure – not least in its omission of Tate Modern’s Switch House
Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern Switch House extension, ‘the most memorable building of the year’. Photograph: Alamy
The Stirling prize has done it again. The award for the UK building that “has made the greatest contribution to the evolution of architecture over the past year” has a magnificent record of not recognising the projects that define their time, of favouring everyone’s second choice and nobody’s first choice, with the result that you could write a convincing history of modern British architecture based on the projects that haven’t won: the Eden Project, the British Library, Birmingham Selfridges, David Chipperfield’s Neues Museum in Berlin, the Saw Swee Hock student centre at the London School of Economics.
This time, the most memorable building of the year, the Switch House extension to Tate Modern, hasn’t even made the shortlist. This omission completes a double: when Tate Modern phase one was completed in 2000, its Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron were ineligible under the then rules. One of the most significant cultural endeavours of the century has therefore been completely missed by the Stirling radar.
This year’s list is, almost, a great one, including dRMM’s low-cost resurrection of Hastings Pier, the deceptively rich studio for Juergen Teller by 6a, Reiach and Hall’s well-considered campus for the City of Glasgow College. I haven’t seen Command of the Oceans, Baynes and Mitchell’s conservation and adaptation of the Chatham Historic Dockyard, but the images show a subtle, inventive and sometimes delightful project.
But the collective effect is insipid. The list favours, above all else, current architects’ propensities for suggestive muteness and for subtly rearranging grids. I’m all for subtlety and understatement and scepticism about grand gestures, but occasionally you want architecture that really seizes your attention, that shapes space in such a way that it moves you, mind, body and memory. Tate does this on a large and public scale.
It might look, for a moment, as if the omission of Tate might have been a brave stand against the mighty reputation of the institution and its architect. Only for a moment, though, until you see that the judges have gone and chosen the extension to the British Museum by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, a practice to which the Stirling has shown exaggerated respect over the years. It’s a well-crafted, elegant building and the conservation studios inside are said to be fine, but it offers only muteness to the street on which it sits, and the exhibition space it provides is, architecturally speaking, a non-event. As its idiom has been mainstream for at least 20 years, it’s not contributing much to the “evolution” of architecture. It has none of the ambition or public spirit of Tate.
Walmer Yard by Peter Salter, also omitted from the Stirling’s list. Photograph: © Hélène Binet
Barrett’s Grove in north London, a small wicker-balconied housing project by Amin Taha, is ingenious and engaging but is one of many of which this could be said. It shouldn’t be on the shortlist. One that should be is Walmer Yard, a group of four singular houses in west London on which an intense level of craft and invention has been lavished by their designer, Peter Salter. Perhaps the Stirling judges thought the project was too indulgent, too much of a rich man’s plaything, but it is by any standards exceptional. Like Tate, Walmer Yard is trying to push the limits of what architecture can do, which Barrett’s Grove and the British Museum building do not.
The Tate extension, majestic though it is, has its flaws. It was expensive, requiring considerable generosity from Len Blavatnik, a man who is not, his press people want to stress, an oligarch, but has oligarchic wealth. The design sometimes makes a lot of effort to do not very much. It has too few lifts. Perhaps the ultimate winner should in any case be something like Hastings Pier – at once public, playful and practical – but if so its victory would be all the more potent had it beaten a project like Tate. Meanwhile the general public, looking at the shortlist, are going to think that architecture is a dull business.
