on 30 November 2001
Photo: Arpingstone / Wikimedia Commons
I’d better be careful what I say about this. Deyan Sudjic made a few sniffy remarks in the Observer and was savaged by an Architects’ Journal columnist within minutes. Not even being a proper architecture critic, I wouldn’t dream of commenting on Portcullis House, the meritless excrescence plonked hideously next to the Houses of Parliament to accommodate MPs at £1m a head, let alone giving credence to the suggestion that its nomination was fiddled by the RIBA.
In any case, Portcullis House didn’t win, and nor did bookies’ favourite the Eden Project. Guy Greenfield’s hispano-brutalist NHS doctor’s surgery was maybe too earthy, and Dixon.Jones’ National Portrait Gallery extension too refined. The judges’ choice was Wilkinson Eyre’s Magna Science Adventure Centre in unfashionable Rotherham, the gigantic conversion of a steelworks into an educational attraction that ‘releases a sense of awe and excitement in all who visit’. Retaining most of the original vast structure, along with crane rails, hoppers and a working arc furnace, the designers have created a spectacular new experience while conserving a dramatic reminder of the industrial past.
It’s brilliant. Some might ask: but is it Great Architecture? But not me.
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