The Stirling Prize - British Architecture's Oscars
Morning Lecture
15 March 2023
30 St. Mary Axe, London
The Stirling Prize is a prize for excellence in architecture and has celebrated the very best contemporary buildings since 1996. It is named after the architect James Stirling and organised and awarded annually by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). It is considered to be the most prestigious architecture award in the United Kingdom.
The prize is awarded to "the architects of the building that has made the greatest contribution to the evolution of architecture in the past year". The architects must be RIBA members. Until 2014, the building could have been anywhere in the European Union, but since 2015 entries have had to be in the United Kingdom.
Some winners, such as Norman Foster’s Gherkin, of 2004, have become enormously successful and appreciated by the wider public. Others have proved harder to love. This entertaining lecture looks at some of the hits, some of the misses, and several buildings that arguably should have won, but didn’t.
Brian Stater lectured at University College London for 25 years, retiring in 2021 as a Senior Teaching Fellow. His principal academic interest lay in the appreciation of architecture and he has a lifelong enthusiasm for photography. He therefore offers lectures to The Arts Society on each of these subjects.
He has written on architecture for a wide range of publications and an exhibition of his own photographs was held at UCL. Brian is a former member of the Association of Historical and Fine Art Photography. He works with a range of cameras, including a pre-War Leica as used by his great hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and many others.
Brian Stater