Rather like contenders for best in show at Crufts, where the perfect chihuahua is obliged to do battle with the perfect great dane, the new British buildings vying for this year’s Stirling prize for excellence in architecture are supremely dissimilar in scale, style and purpose. The shortlist encompasses a medical research centre, almshouse, college of fashion, two houses and a quintessential national monument. Geographically, though, they are conspicuously less disparate, with four schemes in London, one in Hastings and one in Cambridge, which begs the question: is there really no noteworthy new architecture north of the Fens?
Historically associated with pastoral benevolence and distressed gentlefolk, the almshouse gets a modern reboot by architects Witherford Watson Mann. Their Appleby Blue development in Bermondsey, London, is a place of care and shelter, but above all, social connection. The human theatre of residents in its voluminous garden room can be appreciated from the street through a glazed walkway projecting out along the main facade like a shop window. “The idea was to build right in the heart of the community, not to hide people away,” says project architect Stephen Witherford. Both in its architecture and operation, Appleby Blue is a consciously extroverted presence and a retort to the notion that older people (especially poorer older people) should be shunted to the margins, with adverse effects on their mental and physical health.
