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Niall McLaughlin Architects wins the 2022 RIBA Stirling Prize for The New Library, Magdalene College

2022-10-13T16:17:00-04:00

Niall McLaughlin Architects has been awarded the 2022 Stirling Prize by the RIBA. Given each year to the UK’s best new building, the winning scheme was unveiled at an event at RIBA headquarters in London. The firm was awarded the prize for their The New Library, Magdalene College — the first college to win the Stirling Prize.

The new library, open 24 hours a day, incorporates an archive and an art gallery to become a new node in the 700-year-old campus. The library replaces the "cramped study spaces" of an adjacent 17th-century library and extends the campus' quadrangular arrangement of buildings and courts that have gradually developed from the historic college site.

Photo © Nick Kane

"A brief to create a college library with a lifespan of 400 years — to replace a library gifted to Magdalene by Samuel Pepys 300 years previously — is no small task," RIBA shared. "Niall McLaughlin Architects have certainly risen to the challenge with this deft and inspiring temple to learning."

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Níall McLaughlin wins RIBA 2016 Charles Jencks Award

2016-09-21T18:43:00-04:00

“For me, architectural practice includes drawing, writing and building as interlinked activities. It is a continual ferrying between an engagement in the natural processes required to bring something reliable and concrete into being, and the need to clear a space for the expression of doubt, possibility and a half-glimpsed ideal...I am very grateful for the recognition.” — Níall McLaughlin

The RIBA revealed Níall McLaughlin as the 2016 Charles Jencks Award recipient today. Named after landscape designer and architectural theorist Charles Jencks, the award recognizes an individual or practice for their recent major contributions to architectural theory and practice simultaneously.

Bishop Edward King Chapel. Photo © Nick Kane.

Most recently, McLaughlin represented Ireland in the 2016 Venice Biennale with his ‘Losing Myself’ installation, which focuses on the spatial experiences of people with Alzheimer's. His firm also won the RIBA Stephen Lawrence Prize last year.

Find out more on Bustler.

Previously on Archinect:

Herzog & de Meuron named 2015 RIBA Jencks Award winners

Benedetta Tagliabue wins 2013 RIBA Jencks Award

Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: Glimmers of hope ‘beyond the banal and self-harming’

2016-06-01T17:14:00-04:00

Reporting from the Front seeks to also explore which forces—political, institutional or other—drive the architecture that goes “beyond the banal and self-harming”. The 2016 Venice Biennale calls for entries that not only exist in and of themselves, but that are a part of a larger social transformation. As Alejandro Aravena suggests, “improving the quality of the built environment is an endeavor that has to tackle many fronts: from guaranteeing very concrete, down-to-earth living standards […] to expanding the frontiers of civilization.” Pavilions that go down this path exhibit very specific examples of how architecture expands its frontiers.

The Ireland Pavilion’s installation, Losing Myself, explores the different layers of a building as experienced by people suffering from dementia. Co-curator Niall McLaughlin contextualizes the experience of this condition: “when you have dementia you lose the capacity to remember, to find yourself… a little bit like what happens in Venice after w...

London's Natural History Museum to create outdoor exhibition spaces

2016-06-01T03:52:00-04:00

The grounds outside London’s Grade I-listed Natural History Museum are set to become an extension of the institution’s display. Niall McLaughlin Architects and landscape designer Kim Wilkie have submitted plans to transform the museum’s outdoor area into open-air galleries, along with more public spaces. The external parts will showcase extinct plants and animals in the east and living species in the west. There will also be a restaurant, a courtyard and a separate square.

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