Building Awards 2019: Building Magazine Project of the Year

Runners-up

12 Endeavour Square

Entered by Lendlease Construction

Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners’ HQ for the Financial Conduct Authority sets a benchmark for sustainability and wellbeing. A series of stacked central atriums promote openness and connectivity via individual staircase links between clusters of three floors. A two-stage designand-build shell and core contract allowed for the joint procurement of Category A and B fit-out, creating efficiencies that helped net a £2.6m preliminary saving on the project.

Collaborative Teaching Laboratory

Entered by Morgan Sindall

Sheppard Robson’s innovative design for Birmingham university consolidates the accommodation into three huge super-labs, which breaks down the silo structure often associated with scientific research by providing shared facilities for a variety of disciplines. The result is a streamlined trio of labs providing wet, dry and electronic research facilities, with support infrastructure similarly combined.

Lambeth Civic Quarter

Entered by Cartwright Pickard/Chapman BDSP

This ambitious mixed-use scheme includes offices and homes as well as a refurbished former art deco department store. The masterplan creates new public routes and enlivens the public realm with retail and restaurants on the ground floor. As local authorities again become involved in public housing provision, this project is a powerful reminder of how the public sector can play an active role in urban renewal.

Manhattan Loft Gardens

Entered by SOM

This 42-storey residential tower in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park aims to create a visionary new model for a vertical community. Its reinterpretation of the London square as a trio of dramatic roof gardens cut into the building envelope and surrounded by 248 flats that range from double-height industrial lofts to boutique studios sets an ambitious benchmark for high-rise living.

The Ray

Entered by AHMM/McLaren Construction

The Ray carves a sympathetic response to context, seamlessly embedding itself into Clerkenwell’s brick warehouse architecture. It is a streamlined and contemporary version of its local typology, with a rich and buoyant palette of different brick types inside and out. Local residential templates are reflected in the rear of the building, which is moulded into a stepped ziggurat of planted office terraces.

The Royal College of Pathologists

Entered by Bennetts Associates

This pioneering building on the eastern edge of the City seeks to redefine what a royal college is. An assuredly contemporary building in an edgy up-and-coming Aldgate neighbourhood, it combines the ceremonial and administrative in a sleek palette of smooth expanses of brick, concrete and mild sheet steel. Cool, subtle, streamlined and modernist, the project is a powerful contemporary reinterpretation.

UCL Student Centre

Entered by Nicholas Hare Architects for UCL Estates

This £57m purpose-built state-of-the-art teaching and performance academy contains a 500-seat concert hall, a 146-seat recital hall, a 100-seat organ studio, a 100-seat experimental studio, more than 70 teaching rooms and an 80-seat jazz club. Student facilities sit behind a restrained brick facade that eschews the flashy exhibitionism of much of Birmingham’s showpiece civic architecture in recent years.

V&A Dundee

Entered by Bam/Arup/Turner & Townsend

A masterful union of architecture and engineering, Kengo Kuma’s tour-de-force creation features upturned pyramidal volumes hung with thousands of concrete ribs, inspired by local cliffs. Radical construction techniques were used: each rib was digitally scanned and linked to the contractor’s BIM model to build an on-screen heat map that regulated required tolerances.

Wexham Park Hospital Emergency Assessment Centre

Entered by Kier with Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust

The accomplishments of this BPD-designed scheme read like the ultimate wish-list for a medical facility. Completed a month early and £1.5m under budget, it has also reduced average patient stays by a full day and resulted in a 15% rise in the use of same-day emergency care. Prefab MEP service modules were used to speed construction.