Town House Triumphant
Townhouse by Grafton Architects, winner of the 2021 Stirling Prize (images: courtesy of RIBA).
After a year and a half in which societies have existed under various lockdowns, perhaps it was inevitable that the 2021 Stirling Prize would recognise a building that valorised the importance of in-person interaction. As the architect Charles Holland noted on Twitter, “Architecture is always instrumentalised in the service of other, more worthy activities.”
Thus triumphs Townhouse, a £50m addition to Kingston University’s Penrhyn Road campus, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning studio Grafton Architects. Spread over six storeys, the structure is intended as a permeable space that blends town and gown, encompassing a public forum, library, archive, dance studio, theatre and seminar rooms.
It is a likeable and socially worthwhile pitch, particularly following a year in which higher education has been heavily restricted by Covid-19 guidelines. Equally, by blurring the functions of a university with generous public space the building offers a neat line in stressing the value of higher education to society at large.
Certainly, this was the perspective of the Stirling Prize jury, whose spokesperson Norman Foster praised Grafton’s building as “a theatre for life – a warehouse of ideas.”
“It seamlessly brings together student and town communities, creating a progressive new model for higher education, well deserving of international acclaim and attention,” Foster continued. “In this highly original work of architecture, quiet reading, loud performance, research and learning, can delightfully co-exist. That is no mean feat. Education must be our future – and this must be the future of education.”
A worthy winner then? Certainly, there seems little to quibble with in terms of the building’s functioning or formal beauty. Writing in The Financial Times, Edwin Heathcote praised the building’s “imposing six-storey facade of lofty concrete columns, which gives it a formal grandeur but also a permeability suggesting its openness to the public as well as students”.
The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright also found room to praise the architecture’s ability to convey and support its social purpose. “In its free-flowing generosity, it is the exact opposite of the usual institutional world of siloed academic departments protected by swipecards,” Wainwright noted. “Instead, this is a welcoming, transparent place”.
And yet, Townhouse’s victory comes with an asterisk. Simon Allford, president of the Stirling Prize’s awarding body RIBA, has recently called on architecture to take seriously the challenges of climate collapse. “Our biggest challenge is a low carbon built environment,” Allford told RIBA Journal in September.
“I think architects are great problem solvers,” Allford continued. “I don’t think the role is just getting fees for designing buildings; they can advise on what architecture can be, revising, changing a building, seeing how it can be used in a different way. We can help people think differently about the environment.”
It is questionable as to what extent Townhouse fulfils this aim. The building is a precast concrete frame, for which Wainwright suggests no embodied carbon assessment was conducted. Given the well known environmental impact of new-build concrete construction, Townhouse hardly seems the poster child for Allford’s vision of architecture, particularly in a year in which the Pritzker Prize struck a healthy note by awarding its 2021 award to Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, specialists in reuse and adaptation of existing structures.
This critique need not be fatal. New-build structures are still needed (would that it were otherwise, but not everything can be accommodated by refurbishment) and Townhouse’s defenders will point to the quality of the building as enabling both a long lifespan and supporting its social and educational purpose. Allford’s comments called for architects to “help people think differently about the environment”, and there are more ways of doing this than simply labelling concrete verboten. Creating socially valuable, long-lasting structures has a role to play too – although there are means of accomplishing this that do not rely on concrete.
Inevitably, the arbitrariness of any award rears its head. Do Townhouse’s many virtues justify its embodied carbon? Does the project’s lack of engagement with climate issues overwrite its contribution to and reflections on education and public space. There is no metric by which to assess these claims; no easy answer.
Here, a series of industry reactions on Townhouse’s victory published by The Architects’ Journal prove instructive. “[Townhouse] is a beautiful project: sublime, multi-layered, rigorous but unselfconscious,” notes Maggie Mullan of MMA. “It has moved the typology on a decade.”
“While Grafton’s Town House is a good building, offering much to its users and context,[…] does it[…] really move the game on or take on any really urgent, challenging or topical issue?” responds Piers Taylor of Invisible Studio. “At risk of sounding churlish[…] no.”
The point, of course, is that both Mullan and Taylor may be right. Seen in its most flattering light, Townhouse is a worthy winner of the Stirling Prize – a high-quality, community-minded project rightly celebrated after a year of isolation. Viewed critically, there are real questions over the suitability of venerating a six-storey concrete block during a time of climate collapse. Architecture may always be instrumentalised in the service of other, more worthy activities, but debate will inevitably linger as to what those activities should be.
Story Source: The Financial Times, The Guardian, RIBA Journal and The Architects’ Journal