Pick of the bunch: the RIBA announces its 2016 National Awards winners
Following hot on the heels of its regional awards announcements a few weeks ago, the RIBA has just revealed its country-wide top pics for 2016 – the buildings that won a coveted RIBA National Award this year.
In a rigorous search for the best buildings in the country, the RIBA consulted with local and national experts and architects across the UK in order to put together the ultimate list of 46 winners for this year. This same list will act as the pool from which the prestigious RIBA Stirling Prize shortlist will be drawn in about a month’s time.
As per usual, the institute’s honoured projects span a wide range of scales and typologies: from schools to housing; public and infrastructure works to commercial buildings; boutique private houses to larger developments and even an abbey.
Big international names also have a presence on the list of winners, in the form of two Oxford buildings. Herzog & de Meuron’s Blavatnik School of Government is among them, as is the late Zaha Hadid’s shimmering stainless steel Investcorp Building.
More highlights include the blue and curvaceous Drawing Studio by CRAB Studio (Cook Robotham Architectural Bureau) and Wilton’s Music Hall’s conservation and renewal in London's East End.
RIBA president Jane Duncan flagged up this year as an especially successful one for education buildings. ‘One stand-out trend from this year’s crop of winners is the huge scale of investment and ambition shown by many of the UK’s universities and colleges; almost one quarter of the winning projects (11 buildings) are in this category,’ she explains.
The RIBA awards cycle’s next step, the 2016 RIBA Stirling Prize shortlist, will be announced on Thursday 14 July.
INFORMATION
For more information, visit the RIBA's website
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Ellie Stathaki is the Architecture & Environment Director at Wallpaper*. She trained as an architect at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and studied architectural history at the Bartlett in London. Now an established journalist, she has been a member of the Wallpaper* team since 2006, visiting buildings across the globe and interviewing leading architects such as Tadao Ando and Rem Koolhaas. Ellie has also taken part in judging panels, moderated events, curated shows and contributed in books, such as The Contemporary House (Thames & Hudson, 2018), Glenn Sestig Architecture Diary (2020) and House London (2022).
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