Commerzbank, Frankfurt, by Foster and Partners
One sure way of telling if an award is hitting the right spot is to gauge how much heat it generates. The £20,000 Stirling Prize for Architecture, sponsored by The Sunday Times and now in its third year, has on occasion come near to melting point.
We have had judges falling out. We have had over-hopeful architects wrongly convincing themselves - fuelled by bookmakers' odds and press speculation - that they had won. Which has led to some angry and despondent people when they discover they have not. In par-allel, Architecture Week, a nationwide programme of 300 events, has sprung up as a lead-in to it, funded by the Arts Council. Things are coming along nicely.
To recap a bit: the Stirling Prize is named after the late James Stirling, surely the most original and unpredictable of Britain's post-war architects. The prize, for the best new building in Europe by UK-affiliated architects, is the annual culmination of a sequence of awards made by the Royal Institute of British Architects: two earlier heats lead to the final shortlist. But the Stirling Prize judges are free to call in any building they like, and this year, for the first time, the judges have done just that.
The building in question is the new British Library at St Pancras, London. Colin St John Wilson's much delayed £511m building, now open and working quietly and efficiently, has a history of stop-go controversy and is both an extraordinary achievement and monumentally unfashionable. Loved by some, it is reviled by others. Reason enough to include it, the panel feels.
The judges are James Dyson, the designer and industrialist; Marco Goldschmied, director of the Richard Rogers Partnership; Sunand Prasad, architect; Michael Wilford, erstwhile partner of Sir James Stirling and last year's winner for his masterly Music Academy in Stuttgart; and me - all of us chaired by David Rock, the Riba president. Now we have added in the British Library, we have a shortlist of 11 buildings - more than usual, and extremely diverse.
Bigness is well catered for. We also have Europe's tallest tower - Sir Norman Foster's Commerzbank headquarters in Frankfurt, a sleek "green" skyscraper featuring enclosed gardens in the sky. Smallness gets a look-in, too, in the abstract sculptural form of Ian Ritchie's concert platform in Crystal Palace Park, set in a lake. Differently compact is a fine new modern house by Rick Mather Architects in Hampstead, possibly the most difficult place in Britain to get anything contemporary built, and where almost none of its well-heeled inhabitants normally even tries. At £750,000, this might seem expensive for a house, but it's the cheapest project on our list.
