City of Glasgow College building shortlisted for top architecture prize

A NEWLY built college campus in Glasgow has been shortlisted for a top architecture award.

The City of Glasgow College’s City Campus is one of six buildings in the running for the RIBA Stirling Prize.

The honour is given to the UK’s best new building, with the winner announced at the end of October.

The merger of the city’s Central, Metropolitan and Nautical colleges brought together facilities previously housed in 11 separate buildings into two central campuses.

The City Campus, at more than 60,000m² in size, is the second of the two new buildings and boasts 300 high-tech classrooms, multi-purpose lecture theatres and specialist teaching facilities.

The competition’s judges said: “While the initial impression of this building is as something of immense scale which also signals its presence as an important place of learning, its internal spaces are designed to encourage both the formal teaching processes which it contains and informal, more chance encounters.

“The materials palette and form of the building are deliberately restrained to generate something of skill, clarity and elegance, on the grandest scale.

“There is an astonishing scale and complexity to the brief for this project and considerable architectural skill is demonstrated in its realisation; not just in resolving the brief, but in the contribution to the city – in massing, composition and the generosity of the public route through the grand stepped atrium space.

They added: “This architectural skill extends beyond the cityscape through to the detailed care taken in the organisation of student spaces, encouraging social interaction across disciplines, to the considered approach to materials and detailing.”

Alongside the Glasgow newbuild on the shortlist are the Barrett’s Grove apartment block, an extension of the British Museum World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre and a new photography studio for Juergen Teller (all London) as well as the redevelopment of Chatham Historic Dockyard in Kent and Hastings Pier in East Sussex.

RIBA President Jane Duncan said: “The RIBA Stirling Prize is awarded to the building that has made the biggest contribution to the evolution of architecture in a given year.

“This year’s shortlist typifies everything that is special about UK architecture: this is not just a collection of exceptionally well designed buildings but spaces and places of pure beauty, surprise and delight.”