Riba Stirling Prize: Cambridge University library wins top architecture award

The caller room successful Magdalene College, Cambridge, has been named the UK's champion caller building, winning the prestigious Riba Stirling Prize for architecture.

The "exquisitely detailed" gathering by Níall McLaughlin Architects is unfastened 24 hours a day, arsenic portion of the 700-year-old University of Cambridge college.

The prize's judges called it a "solid and confident, yet deferential caller kid connected the assemblage block".

The different 5 shortlisted buildings included a schoolhouse and assemblage centre.

Simon Allford, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba), called the library, which incorporates an archive and creation gallery, a "unique mounting with a wide purpose".

He added that it had been a "significant challenge" to make a gathering that would past astatine slightest 400 years, but that the architects had managed it with "with the utmost skill, attraction and responsibility".

"Well-designed environments hugely amended pupil occurrence and wellbeing. They should beryllium the regularisation for each students and teachers successful each places of learning, not the exception."

Magdalene College's librarian, Dr Marcus Waithe, said the architects had been fixed an "unusually challenging brief: to erect a gathering astatine the borderline of 1 of Cambridge's astir historically delicate sites, and to bash truthful without committing an intrusion".

He added the effect was "an inspiring operation - 1 that would promote our undergraduates to purpose high".

Mr McLaughlin said it was the archetypal clip a assemblage had won the yearly prize, and called the room "a enactment of galore hands and galore minds".

He added: "We knew we were gathering for a lawsuit who was motivated to execute the champion outcome. Our work to the past and aboriginal improvement of this learning assemblage was clear. We were asked to physique for the semipermanent utilizing contiguous resources wisely."

The caller room combines load-bearing brick, gabled pitched roofs and ceramic chimneys, on with a tiered timber interior and a ample vaulted lantern skylight.

The different 5 shortlisted buildings were:

Mr Allford was joined connected the assemblage by architects Glenn Howells and Kirsten Lees, and creator Chris Ofili.