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Rowan Moore picks his favorite UK projects for 2022

2022-12-30T15:22:00-05:00

Playful, elegant additions to universities and colleges were the class acts to follow, while the newly opened Elizabeth line exceeded all design expectations.

Grimshaw’s long-awaited Elizabeth Line finished second (behind Grafton’s Marshall Building for the LSE). Moore said: “The Elizabeth line, when it finally opened in May, revealed an alternative universe of underground railway travel where everything is bigger, brighter and swisher. This is due to the sheer scale of the stations and to their design – unified and orderly but also curvaceous and a touch baroque.”

Notably absent were any projects by the new Soane Medal winner Peter Barber, any other social housing projects, or the Stirling Prize-winning The New Library, Magdalene College from Niall McLaughlin. The Guardian critic did say he admired Theaster Gates’ community building-inspired Serpentine Pavilion, adding that the all-black design “nicely captured shadow and light and views of surrounding greenery.”

Soane Medalist Peter Barber on some possible fixes to the UK's housing crisis

2022-11-11T11:22:00-05:00

There is no housing shortage. There are over 400,000 empty homes in the UK, and about 200,000 homeless people. The vast majority of empty homes are in parts of the country which have become depopulated because of economic decline – in the Midlands, the north, and coastal cities. So the solution to the housing crisis isn’t building tons of homes. It’s about reviving the economy in those places, launching a massive retrofit campaign, and bringing people back.”

“We could end the housing crisis overnight, if we wanted to,” Barber told Oliver Wainwright in a recent interview, referring to the private grab on council housing that has developed unabated since the Thatcher administration's Right-to-Buy laws came into effect in 1980. “We should introduce private sector rent controls, halt the selling of council houses under right to buy, and build 150,000 council homes a year funded by direct taxation."

Marina Tabassum is the 2021 Soane Medalist

2021-11-17T14:18:00-05:00

Marina Tabassum has been named the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Soane Medal honoring her lifework and innovation in the field. The Marina Tabassum Architects founder is the fourth recipient of the medal joining Denise Scott Brown, Rafael Moneo, and Kenneth Frampton on a list of past winners.

Widely admired for her attempts to move away from for-profit architecture and towards a more just and humane application of the profession, Tabassum has been lauded as a trailblazer for female architects, as well as women of color, and was recently among several architects and urban planners named as Academy of American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award winners.

Tabassum referred to past medal winners in a lecture delivered at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London on Tuesday.

“I am 52 years old. Unlike the giants who preceded me to this lectern, I consider myself a work in progress: the search is still on,” she began.

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