Just months after it picked up two prestigious design awards a £150m Tyneside retail development is now favourite to win this year’s Carbuncle Cup — for Britain’s most unattractive new building.
In July Gateshead’s Trinity Square shopping scheme — which replaced the brutalist multi-storey car park immortalised in the 1971 Michael Caine classic Get Carter — was named Best Large Commercial Building in the 2014 regional Local Authority Building Control Excellence Awards. It had already been crowned top commercial property at this spring’s Royal Institute of Commercial Surveyors’ North-East Renaissance Awards.
Now the 240,000sq ft scheme — aimed at changing the face of Gateshead town centre with a mix of retail, food and leisure facilities — has found itself heading the Carbuncle shortlist, the unofficial ugly sister to the Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) Stirling Prize.
Organised by the architecture magazine Building Design, the Tesco flagship anchored complex has received more public nominations than any of its Carbuncle Cup rivals. And by chance one of this year’s judges is former RIBA president Owen Luder — who designed the unloved concrete car park which towered over Gateshead for decades and was finally torn down in 2010.
“The first principle of demolition should be to put up something that was better than was there before,” admitted Luder. “Whatever you thought of the car park, this project is much worse.”
Originally launched in 2006 “to focus attention on the vast numbers of buildings across the country that fall well below the design standards of the projects generally featured in the architectural press” the Carbuncle’s presiding judge, Building Design editor Thomas Lane, admitted he was surprised by the number of nominations Trinity Square had received.
“Good architecture should provide decent places for people to live and work, enhance our towns and cities, be enduring and ultimately uplift the spirit of everyone who interacts with those buildings,” he explained.
“The sad reality is that far too much new development falls short of these basic tenets of good design. Some buildings are unforgivably bad and deserve to be named and shamed which is where the Carbuncle Cup comes in.”
Designed by 3D Reid and built by Spenhill Developments, Trinity Square is the only commercial project on the shortlist. Its inclusion has not gone down well in Gateshead, however.
Mary Foy, the local authority’s cabinet member for the economy, claimed that more than three-million people had voted with their feet by visiting the scheme in its first year. “I am truly shocked that Trinity Square has been nominated as one of the UK’s ugliest buildings,” she said. “Which is a shame.”
Running a close second on the Carbuncle shortlist is the 50-storey Vauxhall Tower, on the banks of the River Thames beside London’s Vauxhall Bridge. Tony Pidgely, chief executive of developer Berkeley Group, has already admitted that the project “could have been better”.
The other four other nominees are: Woolwich Central, a residential development in south London, designed by Sheppard Robson; the Chancellor’s Building, an education centre for the University of Bath by Stride Treglown; an east London student housing scheme by BDP called Unite Stratford City, and the QN7 apartment block conceived by CZWG on a site near the Arsenal Emirates football stadium in north London.
Previous Post
Manchester United Legends close in on Bootle Street Deal
