And the winner is...

Last night, the winner of the RIBA Stirling Prize 2015 was announced: Burntwood School in Earlsfield, South London by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris.  

When I visited the site two months ago, together with the 3 other shortlisted projects located in London, I reported that I thought that this was the least inspired of the lot (stroll down to the bottom of that post for my visit to Burntwood School).  

For a contrasting, more positive assessment, though, take a look at Oliver Wainwright's write-up in Guardian. 

Wainwright makes a persuasive-sounding case for the building, but I stand by my criticisms. People are drooling over the angled concrete pre-cast panels, but only because this 50s/60s retro style is currently bang on trend: indeed, half the other buildings on the shortlist have a similar sort of finish.  The panels are unlikely to provide much lasting visual interest, although, in fairness, the Guardian article does talk about "... the changing light playing across the buildings’ hefty sculpted surfaces" inspiring students' artist endeavours.  Hmm, mayyy-be. But if, instead, the real gravamen of the appeal is (consciously or unconsciously), as I suggest, the present modishness of the retro concrete style, then that really tells against the decision.  It takes a particularly moronic type of philistinism to treat astuteness to trend as the highest possible virtue in art.   Particularly a type of art (architecture) whose physical presence has an unfortunate habit of sticking around for much longer than the trend in question.  But there we. It is the RIBA we are dealing with here, after all.

Maybe it all gets a lot better inside: I didn't get to see the interior when I swung by.  But the pictures do not look that all that compelling.  Indeed, all Wainwright really has to say about the inside is that the classrooms "... enjoy high ceilings and big windows".  Well, the high ceilings are surely a product of the awesomely handsome £41 million budget and the capacious nature of the school's suburban grounds rather than any special genius on the part of the design team.  And the big windows might have something to do with the fact that the extensive grounds means that the main new building is lucky enough not to be immediately overlooked / overlooking other properties: again, not a triumph to the lay at the feet of the architects.  

Contrast the generous parameters of the brief for Burntwood School with that of, say, Clapham Manor Primary School, which was nominated for the Stirling Prize in 2010 but didn't win.  Clapham Manor, which I visited during last year's Open House London, involved a much more challenging brief: the size of the site for the new extension was not much more than a postage stamp.  Yet it converted this into a far, far better-designed building.  That school presents an inciting, welcoming front to the street, with interior packed full of ingenious features, such as easy to open, letter-box-shape windows which somehow give the classrooms, as the review linked above points out, the sensation of nesting in the trees. 

Burntwood, instead, goes in for dull, po-faced seriousness.  Indeed, one of the stated ambitions of the design was to ape the feel of a university campus in the hope that the supposedly more 'grown-up'-virtues of tertiary education will rub off on the pupils by association - a painfully crass gambit for the reasons mentioned in my earlier post. 

What the Burntwood design had going for it was, crudely, a very, very generous budget, as mentioned earlier. And that really is the main point of the RIBA's decision, it seems. For this was one of the last schools to be built under the last Labour government's Building Schools for the Future initiative, which was cancelled under Michael Gove's tenure as Secretary of State for Education.  As Wainwright himself says, the decision to award the Prize to this project "... sends out an important message about the importance of investing in the design of schools". Hear, hear: but is the RIBA really the best, the most-disinterested stakeholder to be delivering that message?  

You see, I'm by inclination a supporter of the Building Schools for the Future programme that the Coalition government scrapped.  Gove's accusation that architects were "creaming off cash" under the scheme sounded, frankly, hysterical.  If this was something that was ever happening, the Government ought to have been able to prevent it through being a canny client and drafting better appointment terms and generally keeping better tabs over procurement processes.  Yet if the RIBA wanted to itself lend substance to suspicions that the programme (or any hoped-for replacement) is viewed by architects as a gravy train, using the Stirling Prize to make a political statement by handing out the award to the mediocre, but very costly Burntwood School is a great way to go about it.