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THE Haworth Tompkins practice has carried off the coveted Riba Stirling Prize 2014 for the best building of the year with its new Everyman theatre in Liverpool.
It’s a worthy choice, not least because it is a public building that spectacularly reflects the sense of civic pride in a well-loved theatre on Merseyside.
For once the visually engaging but egotistic and remote edifices of the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics by Zaha Hadid or the Shard by Renzo Piano in London have been discarded in favour of a building which connects with ordinary people and their sense of place and belonging.
Building on the sight of the old Everyman Theatre, which opened in 1964 in the shell of a 19th-century chapel, Haworth Tompkins have admirably met the complex challenges of retaining the soul of the iconic old theatre embodied in its informality and sense of ownership by the local community.
The end product is a captivating visual exterior with an ingenious facade and an elegant interior which engages in dialogue and does not patronise.
Environmentalists too will surely applaud the fact that the building’s construction reused 90 per cent of the material from the old theatre.
All spaces are naturally ventilated including the 440-seat uditorium, one of the first in Britain.
Riba’s 2014 Stephen Lawrence Prize, awarded to the best project with a small construction budget and intended to encourage fresh talent, was won by Denizen Works for House No 7, a crofter’s cottage on the Isle of Tiree in Scotland.
Michal Boncza
