News: a shopping centre that replaced an iconic Brutalist car park and a controversial tower beside the River Thames are among the six projects on the Carbuncle Cup 2014 shortlist for the UK's worst new building.
British architecture magazine Building Design (BD) has announced the shortlist for its annual award for the worst building completed in the UK in the past 12 months.
After four months of public nominations, the final list was selected by a judging panel including the magazine's editor Thomas Lane, former Royal Institute of British Architects president Owen Luder and Hank Dittmar, urbanist and advisor to the Prince's Trust – the charity run by the Prince of Wales.
The building that received the most public nominations was Trinity Square in Gateshead, designed by 3D Reid and developed by Spenhill Developments. The shopping centre replaced an iconic Brutalist car park designed by Carbuncle Cup judge Owen Luder, which features in the 1971 Michael Caine film Get Carter.
"The first principle of demolition should be to put up something that was better than was there before," said Luder. "Whatever you thought of the car park, this project is much worse."
Another of the shortlisted nominations is Vauxhall Tower, a 50-storey round building that occupies a site on the banks of the River Thames by London's Vauxhall Bridge. Tony Pidgely, chief executive of developer, Berkeley Group, conceded that the project "could have been better" but said the company would learn from its mistakes.
The other four on the list are: Woolwich Central by Sheppard Robson, a residential development in south London; 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 another block of apartments designed by CZWG on a site near the Arsenal Emirates football stadium in north London known as QN7 flats.
Originally launched as a critical counterpoint to the Stirling Prize, the Carbuncle Cup aims to focus attention of the vast numbers of buildings across the country that fall well below the design standards of the projects generally featured in the architectural press.
"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," said BD editor Thomas Lane.
"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."
The 2014 winner of the Carbuncle Cup will be announced next week.