STIRLING OF STIRLINGS

VOTE for the RIBA Journal SCHÜCO Stirling of Stirlings, in collaboration with ribapix.com

TO CELEBRATE this 175th anniversary year of the RIBA we are highlighting the best buildings of the past and pitting them against each other in a one-off architectural super-award. We have divided the RIBA epoch into seven 25-year periods and selected a shortlist of seven key buildings from each. Now we want you to vote for your personal winner from each period, to generate our final shortlist of seven – and from this our panel of judges will choose the best building of the past 175 years. By no means an easy task, given the riches on offer. VOTE NOW!

Of course there are many great buildings that don’t make it onto our highly subjective list. We’ll publish a selection of alternative nominations if you write to us or email us at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Will Mackintosh beat Jacobsen? Will Lutyens trump Lubetkin or Lasdun? Does Spence eclipse Scott? Is Brunel better than Burton? Can Stirling himself squash the Smithsons? Only one way to find out. Get voting!

Click here to be taken to our online poll. Then simply select each of your seven favourites, one only from each period, and then hit the VOTE button.

Or write to us at RIBA Journal, 45/47 Clerkenwell Green, London EC1R 0EB, or fax 020 7490 4957.

Your vote must reach us by 5pm on Friday May 8.

Have fun, and watch out for the winner of our ‘Stirling of Stirlings’, to be announced at the start of June.

Read editor Hugh Pearman’s ‘Stirling of Stirlings’ blog and leave us a comment. Simply click here.

1834-1858
From neo-gothic to early high tech

01 Palace of Westminster, London
Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Pugin, 1844-56
Masterly neo-gothic. ‘Tudor details on a classic body,’ said Pugin.

02 St George’s Hall, Liverpool
Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, interiors by Sir Charles Robert Cockerell, 1840-54
Florid or grand? Classical entablature-fronted concert halls and courts.

03 Palm House, Kew
Decimus Burton and Richard Turner, 1841-48
Steamy precursor to modernism’s lightweight designs.

04 Crystal Palace, London
Joseph Paxton and Charles Fox, 1850-51
The ultimate prefab glass house and demountable to boot.

05 Leeds Town Hall
Cuthbert Brodrick, 1853-58
Municipal palace in baroque interpretation of classical style.

06 Oxford University Museum
Thomas Deane and Benjamin Woodward, 1855-60
Geology and botany embodied in the stone and iron of Ruskin’s pet project.

07 Paddington Station, London
Isambard Brunel with Matthew Digby Wyatt, 1854-5
Cathedral of transport: but does the ornament lessen the engineering?

1859-1883
English freestyle develops

01 Red House, Bexley
Philip Webb, William Morris, 1859
‘Very medieval in spirit,’ said Morris of his home, the first building by his friend Webb.

02 St Pancras Station and hotel, London
William Barlow, Rowland Ordish, and (for the hotel) George Gilbert Scott, 1868-74
Aspiring and highly decorated gothic in red brick with ambitious wide-span train shed behind.

03 Royal Courts of Justice, London
George Edmund Street, 1866-82
Perfect venue for high minded ideas of justice in this last gasp of London gothic.

04 Manchester Town Hall
Alfred Waterhouse, 1869-77
Masterful occupation of triangular block pushing city’s civic pride up to 286 feet onto the skyline.

05 Natural History Museum, London
Alfred Waterhouse, 1873-81
Distinctive romanesque layered arches of the entrance lead onto the dinosaurs in the grandly planned central court.

06 Keble College, Oxford
William Butterfield, 1867-75
Essay in polychromy with coloured bands of brickwork leavening the scale of the college quad.

07 Cragside, Northumberland
Richard Norman Shaw, 1870-85
Rugged pile on a rugged hill or picturesque personified?

1884-1908
Arts and crafts triumphant

01 Glasgow School of Art
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 1907-09
A fairytale castle with a magical interior, rich yet austere: his finest achievement.

02 Deanery Gardens, Sonning
Edwin Lutyens, 1899-1902
One of the best of his earlier arts and crafts-influenced houses. More than matches contemporary Wright.

03 Broad Leys, Windermere
CFA Voysey, 1898
Informal, comfortable, forward looking – but Voysey always denied being a proto-modernist.

04 Blackwell, Windermere
Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, 1900
This was the golden age of the country house, and Scott’s is one of the best, now restored.

05 Letchworth Garden City
Parker and Unwin, 1903 onwards
It’s all in the non-monumental plan, the embodiment of Ebenezer Howard’s garden city ideals.

06 All Saints Church, Brockhampton, Herefordshire
William Lethaby, 1900-02
Some say this was the most original church of its time. Mixing periods and materials, it transcends time and place.

07 First Church of Christ Scientist, Manchester
Edgar Wood, 1903
But Wood was arguably more original still in this remarkably early modern-organic composition. A great talent.

1909-1933
High imperial to early modern

01 Three Graces, Pierhead, Liverpool
Various architects, completed 1916
The ensemble effect counts more than the individual designs. Swaggering civic pride.

02 Viceroy’s House, New Delhi
Edwin Lutyens, 1912-31
Extraordinary fusion of British and Mughal style, a palace for the Raj.

03 Memorial to the Missing of the Somme,Thiepval
Edwin Lutyens, 1927-32
A soaring remembrance of senseless human sacrifice, an open-air cathedral.

04 Portmeirion, Wales
Clough Williams-Ellis, begun 1931
More than merely picturesque, this village is a masterly piece of urban bricolage.

05 ‘High and Over’, Amersham
Amyas Connell, 1929-31
A key early modernist house on a prime site, audaciously planned and confidently executed.

06 Highpoint 1, London
Lubetkin and Tecton, 1933-5
Pioneering structural techniques, this was a new kind of luxury high-rise living, imposing and elegant.

07 London Underground expansion stations
Charles Holden, begun late 1920s
Varied yet cohesive, sharing a common language: an enlightened act of public sector patronage.

1934-1958
Modernism takes hold

01 Isokon building, north London
Wells Coates, 1933-34
Modernist lines of an ocean liner in this small experiment in communal living for design firm Isokon.

02 The Homewood, Surrey
Patrick Gwynne, 1938
Home, office and modernist showcase designed at the shockingly young age of 24 as a home for his parents.

03 Brynmawr Rubber Factory, south Wales
Architects Co-partnership, Ove Arup, 1946-53
Long and low icon of shellconcrete construction, demolished 2001.

04 Royal Festival Hall, London
Robert Matthew, Leslie Martin and Peter Moro, 1948-51
A moment of post-war hope expressed in modernism and the myth of democratic regeneration.

05 Congress House, London
David du roi Aberdeen, 1948–56
Sweeping curves and spacious ground floor for Trade Union Congress, despite the tight central London site.

06 St Catherine’s College, Oxford
Arne Jacobsen, 1964
Jacobsen’s controlled choreography: from campanile to cutlery.

07 Coventry Cathedral
Sir Basil Spence, 1951-62
Rising delicately alongside blitz ruins, with precious side chapels that tap into the best of talents modern art.

1959-1983
High-tech revival and post-modern

01 St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross, Glasgow
Gillespie Kidd and Coia, 1961-66
MacMillan and Metsztein’s masterly homage to Corb, abandoned in 1980 and a cause celebre for modern conservationists.

02 Leicester Engineering building
Stirling and Gowan, 1959-63
The university needed engineering workshops and a water tower: they got a neoconstructivist masterpiece.

03 Royal College of Physicians, London
Denys Lasdun, 1960-64
The best building from Lasdun’s best period, still immaculate today.

04 Economist complex, St James, London
Alison and Peter Smithson, 1959-64
The Smithsons were better theorists than builders, but here they succeeded by invoking mediaevalism.

05 Willis Faber Dumas HQ, Ipswich
Foster & Partners, 1970-75
Michael Hopkins played a key role in this pivotal Foster project which reinvented the office building type.

06 Pompidou Centre, Paris
Piano and Rogers, 1972-76
Nothing like this had ever been built. A famous competition yielded an exuberant, slightly crazy masterpiece.

07 Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart
Stirling Wilford, 1977-83
This commission revived the Stirling brand, the acceptable face of post-modernism. Beefy yet subtle, like Jim.

1984-2009
Into the icon era

01 Lloyds of London
Richard Rogers, 1986
The design team turned out to be a Who’s Who of British architecture and gave the City its first new world-class building for years.

02 Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank HQ
Foster and Partners, 1986
The other side of the world: Foster was reinventing the skyscraper. This rightly brought him international acclaim.

03 Lord’s Media Centre, London
Future Systems, 1999
Winning the Stirling Prize for this sleek yacht-hull of a building did wonders for Jan Kaplicky and Amanda Levete. It advanced science in architecture.

04 Eden Project, Cornwall
Grimshaw Architects, 2001
It should have won the Stirling. ETFE foil meets rammed earth in Bucky Fuller-inspired ecological dream. Massively popular.

05 Jubilee Line extension stations
Many architects, 2001
An exemplary client in Roland Paoletti led to utterly individual stations, all good, some masterly. London’s civic pride was revived.

06 30 St Mary Axe (the Gherkin)
Foster and Partners, 2005
Beautifully proportioned and detailed, on a gift of a site. Foster reinvented the skyscraper again: it captured the public imagination.

07 Phaeno Science Centre, Wolfsburg
Zaha Hadid, 2005
Fluid use of structural concrete epitomises Hadid’s blurring of ground plane and building. Enigmatic, scientific exhibit itself.

Get voting! Click here to be taken straight to our online poll.

You can now view images (thanks to a quick search on Google Images) of all the shortlisted buildings from each period. Click on the links to the right, under the pencil icon.