The Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling Prize is a British prize for distinction in architecture. It is named after the architect James Stirling, organised and awarded annually by using the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The RIBA Stirling Prize is introduced to “the architects of the building that has made the greatest contribution to the evolution of architecture in the previous year”. The architects need to be RIBA members and until 2014, the construction ought to be anywhere in the European Union, but account that 2015 has had to be in the UK. In the past, the award has come with a £20,000 prize, however, currently, it contains no prize money.

Stirling Prize: Alsop & Störmer - Sheet1
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The award was once founded in 1996 and is considered to be the most prestigious structure award in the United Kingdom. It is published as the architectural equal of the Booker Prize (literature) and Turner Prize (visual arts). The Stirling Prize changed the RIBA Building of the Year Award.

The Stirling Prize is the very best profile architectural award in British culture, and the presentation ceremony has in the past been televised using Channel 4. It is presently backed with the aid of developer Almacantar. Six shortlisted constructions are chosen from a long list of constructions that have acquired a RIBA National Award. These awards are given to buildings showing “high architectural requirements and vast contribution to the nearby environment”.

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In addition to the RIBA Stirling Prize, five different awards are given to buildings on the long list. In 2015, they consisted of: the RIBA National Award, the RIBA Regional Award, the Manser Medal, the Stephen Lawrence Prize, and the RIBA Client of the Year Award. For years before 1996, the award was recognized as the “Building of the Year Award”.

William Allen Alsop 

Stirling Prize: Alsop & Störmer - Sheet
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William Allen Alsop OBE RA (12 December 1947 – 12 May 2018) was a British architect and Professor of Architecture at the University for the Creative Arts’s Canterbury School of Architecture. He was accountable for various specific and controversial modernist structures which are typically distinguished via their use of shiny colorings and unusual avant-garde forms. In 2000, Alsop gained the Stirling Prize, the most prestigious structure award in the United Kingdom, for the Peckham Library in London.

Alsop’s architectural heroes have been Le Corbusier, Sir John Soane, John Vanbrugh, and Mies van der Rohe. His avant-garde, modernist buildings are typically amazing using their brilliant use of brilliant coloration and unusual forms. One of the rationale for this is that one can clearly manage what one is doing – and that interested him a lot. For him, the act of portraying collectively and working carefully with the customer and the local community are integral ingredients in urban design and architecture.

Stirling Prize: Alsop & Störmer - Sheet4
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In 2004, Alsop posted a book entitled Supercity which elicited a lot of debate. It used to be the issue of a Channel 4 television documentary and an exhibition at the Urbis museum in Manchester. This book described his imaginative and prescient of a “Supercity”. It included a discussion of the increasing interconnectivity of the cities alongside this hall is altering the principles of a “city”, and the development to merge the thinking of the rural and urban. It additionally blanketed a variety of architectural thoughts of feasible buildings and communities in this city. Although there used to be some political support for his ideas, with The Times claiming that former British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott used to be a supporter,the Supercity has its critics.

Peckham Library 

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Peckham Library is a library and neighbourhood building located in Peckham in south-east London. It was designed through Alsop and Störmer, engineered using AKT II, and won the Stirling Prize for Architecture in 2000. It is a hanging construction best imagined as an inverted capital letter ‘L’, with the upper part supported via thin steel pillars set at curiously random angles. The exterior is clad with pre-patinated copper.

The Stirling prize judges had been impressed with the building’s approach. Alsop has taken the graph footprint of a conventional library and elevated it to create a public space beneath the construction and to remove the quiet reading area from avenue level noise. The remaining, helping constructions on the ground and 1st flooring house the facts and media centre.

The library opened to the public on March 8, 2000, with an authentic opening by Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Chris Smith, on May 15, 2000. The construction attracted 500,000 site visitors in its first 12 months of opening in the wake of its receipt of the prize. This dropped to about 420,000 for 2006.

References:

  1. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Stirling_Prize
Author

Sriya Mitra is a student of architecture from Kolkata with a strong interest in journalism. Apart from being a student, she is a fencer which allows her to travel to new places and explore more.