Six hundred years after it was founded as a hostel for Benedictine student monks, Magdalene College in Cambridge has scooped the RIBA Stirling prize for best new building in the UK – for a library designed to last for another four centuries.
Standing next to the 17th-century Pepys Library, the cramped study spaces of which it replaces, Magdalene’s new building has a timeless air. Fronting on to the fellows’ garden with a row of tall brick chimneys and pitched gables, it looks as if it might have time-travelled from the college’s Tudor past, only transposed through a stripped, modernist lens. Its redbrick walls and projecting oak bay windows nod to the medieval college courts, while the interior unfolds as a 3D lattice of bookshelves and cosy reading nooks.
