RIBA Worldwide Awards 2004

Architectural Review, The, July, 2004

with over 4300 chartered members outside the UK, the Royal Institute of British Architects is a truly international body. It is fitting therefore that this year for the first time, the RIBA has added the RIBA Worldwide Awards to its annual award scheme. The awards are for buildings built outside the EU, designed by a UK practice where at least one principal is an RIBA member. The buildings were judged by the RIBA Awards group: Tony Chapman, Peter Davey, Paul Finch, Glenn Howells, Niall McLaughlin, Eric Parry, Jeremy Till, Joanna van Heyningen, and Giles Worsley.

In collaboration with Polish architects Jems Architekci, Foster and Partners' office building makes a major contribution to the re-establishment of one of Warsaw's most important public spaces, Pilsudski Square (formerly Victory Square). Without dominating the space, the new building completes the square by filling a missing side. As a counterbalance to its historic neighbours, this sensitive approach derived from a constructive dialogue with the city's historic monuments conservator. The five-sided structure unites three separate but linked office buildings into a single composition, organized around a 50m diameter courtyard, allowing permeable short cuts, while creating a clearly defined new public space. Glass facades maximize daylight penetration, but are given an apparent solidity in its more traditional neighbours with vertical granite fins (solid when viewed obliquely, transparent when seen head on). Metropolitan is a building of sophisticated civility that shows how contemporary architecture can enhance the urban realm without setting out to draw attention to itself. It is a fitting contribution to Warsaw's increasingly cosmopolitan character.

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On a tight corner site in downtown Cincinnati, this contemporary art gallery provides seven levels of public space. With galleries of different sizes occupying its perimeter, an atrium brings daylight to the back of the building. The fully glazed ground floor shop front allows the pavement to run into the building, turning up the rear wall, directing the attention of visitors to the suspended volumes overhead. Solid concrete blocks with narrow gaps, the galleries are fragments of a greater whole, changing by day and night as light shines through. The building exploits the drama of this interlocked matrix of mass and light as stepped ramps zigzag through the atrium, revealing the sheer concrete wall and the great tottering stack of galleries.

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OCAD commissioned Alsop Architects to expand their facilities buildings. Design workshops with college staff and students led to a lively process and the exchange of ideas. A courageous, bold--if admittedly slightly insane--solution emerged, which while evoking strong and contradictory responses, was commended by the jury as highly imaginative. Elevated spaces, nine storeys above the ground, saved land that might otherwise have been built on and preserved low level views from across the street to the park. The design has proved very successful in the college's fund-raising campaign.

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FOA won the competition to design the Yokohama International Port's Terminal in 1995, responding to a brief that called for a passenger cruise terminal and a mix of civic facilities for local citizens--all under one roof. The architects created a public space instead of producing a monument or gateway to travel. The clarity of the concept, the roof as an open plaza and extension to the nearby parks--the missing link in a chain of public parks along the city's waterfront--has been carried through with brave determination, balancing stringent pragmatics of a complex circulation with highly technical engineering constraints in a poetic vision that remains undiminished in execution. At the scale of civil engineering, the complexity has been mastered without the confusion that can easily overwhelm projects with such a vast array of professional requirements.

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Pinned between the switchbacks of a precipitous Alpine road, this villa responded to a number of specific verbal clues from the client, such as 'I work in the cool of those shading pine trees', and 'make breakfast here looking this way'. From these word-pictures the architects built up a living diagram strung across the site, which in turn formed the basis for the final design. The steep slope becomes a collection of terraces connected by a winding stepped path, with buildings tucked under or placed on the terraces. Secondary buildings for guests, cars and services are then recessed beneath the plane of the terrace, with the main house an almost free-standing object at the highest point of the site.

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The principal experience is the discovery of the view as you walk from the upper entrance through the main living rooms. Drawn instinctively towards the edge, overlooking the distant peaks and valleys, the terraces act as an immediate horizon, with the building framing the almost infinite expanse of sky, clouds, mountains and water.