‘Curiously self-effacing, despite its cubic chonk’ … Paddington Square in London, led by architecture studio Renzo Piano. Photograph: Hufton and Crow View image in fullscreen ‘Curiously self-effacing, despite its cubic chonk’ … Paddington Square in London, led by architecture studio Renzo Piano. Photograph: Hufton and Crow Architecture Renzo Piano’s giant glass cube towers over the rest of the Stirling prize’s samey brick-built shortlist Catherine Slessor Coming from the same developer as the Shard, London’s latest trophy building may be 54 storeys shorter than envisaged but should rise to building of the year
If Irvine Sellar, the larger-than-life developer who gave London the 95-storey hypodermic pinnacle of the Shard, had had his way, the UK’s tallest building would have been joined by a sibling: a 72-storey residential tower soaring above Paddington Station, the pair of leviathans winking conspiratorially at each other across the capital. In the end the Paddington Pole, as it became known, attracted the feather-spitting ire of heritage bodies and community groups, and after 1,800 objections, was refused planning permission by Westminster Council.
Undaunted, Sellar and his architect Renzo Piano – the Italian imperator of hi-tech and co-designer, with Richard Rogers, of Paris’s Pompidou Centre – went back to the drawing board and simply lopped off 54 storeys. And so, in a reverse ferret that was a gift to headline writers (“Pole-axed” trumpeted Building magazine), the Pole became the Cube: an 18-storey office block, homogenous, crystalline and curiously self-effacing, despite its cubic chonk, its glacial glass walls reflecting the grey London sky.
It’s a shortlist dominated by the ‘Jaguar dashboard’ school of design: tastefully refined, quintessentially English Beyond being a trophy tower, it also shapes a new public realm around its base, palpably uplifting the historically dispiriting experience of arriving at Paddington station. Previously, passengers were funnelled down a dismal ramp into what looked like a giant mouse hole. Now, they are ushered towards a paved piazza, part of a network of spaces and routes designed to embed the station more legibly and logically into its wider surroundings.
View image in fullscreen Statement beige … Fairmead High Beach housing in Epping, designed by Sergison Bates architects. Photograph: Johan Dehlin Sellar, who once said “with the Shard, we can kick sand in the face of the Eiffel Tower”, died in 2017 , before he could witness either the Cube’s completion or celebrate a vindication of sorts by its inclusion, now rebadged as Paddington Square, in this year’s shortlist for the Stirling prize , the annual award for the best new building in Britain.
Coordinated by the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba), an exhaustive odyssey of regional and national awards has finally concluded, with six contenders emerging to duke it out for the coveted Stirling, the winner being announced in October.
In a shortlist dominated by what might be described the “Jaguar dashboard” school of design – tastefully refined and quintessentially English, tonally as well as geographically – Paddington Square is the conspicuous outlier, in its sheer scale and also being the only scheme not made of brick. Otherwise, it’s a toss up between a brick house, a brick housing scheme, two brick additions to Cambridge colleges, and a brick extension to an existing theatre. In some ways, you’d be hard pressed to distinguish…