MANCHESTER’s new £25 million HOME arts complex and £61 million National Graphene Institute (NGI) are two of 46 projects named on the 2016 RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) National Awards list – the UK’s most prestigious accolade for new architecture.
...it is encouraging to see so much emphasis placed on the power of architecture to help institutions to attract students and stand out from the mediocre
In a list dominated by higher education buildings – including Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and a bizarre blue Teletubbiesque drawing school in Bournemouth – the two Manchester contenders will compete to make the six-strong RIBA Stirling Prize shortlist later this year.
Designed by award-winning Dutch architects Mecanoo, HOME (main image) opened with a bang in May last year with a ‘HOMEwarming’ Bank Holiday weekend curated by Oscar-winning director and patron Danny Boyle.
The arts complex features: a 500-seat main theatre, a 150-seat flexible theatre space, a 500 square metre gallery, five cinemas, digital production and broadcast facilities, a bar, a cafe bar, a cinema bar and a bookshop.
Judges said HOME’s ‘deceptively simple form and enclosure masks a complexity of interconnected and overlapping spaces and functions that are a lesson in being ‘just right’.
They praise the building’s ‘honesty’ and ‘lack of pretention’, though question HOME’s position within the wider First Street development.
The £61m NGI has been awarded a RIBA award alongside HOMEFollowing the first isolation of graphene – the world’s new one-atom thick wonder material – at the University of Manchester in 2004, the University set about creating a new home to enable academics and industry to work side-by-side to accelerate the material’s commercialisation.
The result – opened last year by George Osborne – was the £61m National Graphene Institute (NGI), a world-leading facility comprising almost 8000 square metres of collaborative work space, research laboratories, seminar space, offices and a rooftop garden featuring 21 different grasses and wildflowers designed to attract urban pollinators.
Judges said the NGI – designed by architects Jestico + Whiles - ‘is a building that expertly balances the enormous servicing and technical demands of laboratory space with the experimental requirement of a place that will attract some of the brightest minds in science and industry’.
RIBA president Jane Duncan, recognising this year’s ‘stand-out trend’ for higher education projects, said: “As universities and colleges in the UK are competing for students from here and overseas, it is encouraging to see so much emphasis placed on the power of architecture to help institutions to attract students and stand out from the mediocre.”
See the full RIBA Awards list here
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