|
Zaha Hadid Architects has won its second consecutive Stirling Prize, the top honor awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects, for the design of the Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton, UK.
 |
|
Hufton Crow |
| Zaha Hadid Architects’ Evelyn Grace Academy. |
“Evelyn Grace had a complex brief: four schools under a single academy umbrella and the consequent dichotomy of having to express both independence and unity,” the Royal Institute said. “Curiously for a school whose speciality is sport, the site lacks any opportunity for significant outdoor sport but the architects have responded with guile and intelligence.”
The academy works as a functional modern school that “makes kids run to get into school in the morning—what free school is going to do that?,” the Royal Institute adds.
The Royal Institute said the project “is distinguished by its planning, not its form of expression; its saltire plan solving the multiple demands of site and usage in a manner that seems effortless.”
Zaha Hadid Architects said its design “offers a learning environment that is spatially reassuring and able to engage students actively.” The “highly functional” spaces are said to maximize natural light and ventilation and make use of “understated but durable textures.”
To produce a setting that encourages interaction, “the external shared spaces are layered to create informal social and teaching areas at various levels based on the convergence of multiple functions.”
 |
|
Photo ©Luke Hayes |
| The academy works as a functional modern school that “makes kids run to get into school in the morning,” the Royal Institute of British Architects said. |
More information: Stirling Prize 2011 and Evelyn Price Academy.
Zaha Hadid Architects won the Stirling Prize in 2010 with the MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, in Rome; see Stirling Prize 2010.
The Stirling prize was established in 1996 and is named after the noted British architect Sir James Stirling 1926-1992).
|
Follow us on Twitter
Join us on Facebook
