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Some of the world's most magnificent public buildings may meet their match this year as part of a new international prize which pits the established greats of contemporary architecture against smaller gems whose delicate designs and demure charms are often overlooked.
From schools and shopping centres to railways and recycling plants, buildings of all shapes and sizes are eligible for the World Architecture Festival Awards, which, with a shortlist of more than 250, will make up the profession's biggest awards programme when it is held in Barcelona in late October.
Unlike most architectural honours, which tend to be decided behind closed doors and are therefore hard to enter for anyone without an already well-established international reputation, the new award will be open to any building completed since the beginning of 2007.
Neither a humble purpose nor seeming mundanity need be a barrier to success; the prize is designed to pay tribute to great architecture whatever its form and wherever its location.
"The inaugural World Architecture Festival awards will showcase, compare and contrast an outstanding range of completed buildings," the event's organisers say on their website.
"The festival will reflect the increasingly international nature of architecture, while also celebrating its regional roots," they said.
Open to nominations from any country, regardless of the architect's nationality, the awards will be divided into 16 main categories, with prizes for civic buildings, for schools or other places of learning, for hospitals and other healthcare buildings, homes, theme parks, shopping centres, places of worship, sports halls, and energy, waste or recycling plants.
To ensure a contemporary theme, entries are welcome for any new, restored or converted building completed between 1 January 2007 and 20 June this year, the closing date.
In all, 256 projects will be shortlisted, and presented in front of an audience and a jury headed by Norman Foster, the architect behind the gherkin-shaped Swiss Re building in central London and the restoration of the Reichstag in Berlin.
Fellow members of the panel will be the British architects Will Alsop, Charles Jencks and Richard Burdett. Together, the big names will decide which of all the nominations across all the categories deserves the ultimate accolade, the Prix de Barcelona.
The prize, supported by 26 architectural magazines, is backed by influential voices in the industry.
If one of them has his way, constructions as apparently humble as public lavatories could be up for consideration in Spain. Peter Finch, editor of The Architectural Review, has included the lavatories and London flower kiosks in his personal list of 10 great underrated developments.
"A really first-class small building should beat a very decent big one," he said.
"Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, for example, was probably the most influential building in the world in the year it was completed, even though it was only a house. It redefined domestic architecture."
TERMINAL 5 AND OTHER MARVELS
Nordpark Railway, Austria
Julia Peyton-Jones, director of the Serpentine Gallery
"Among the most extraordinary achievements in world architecture in recent months are the visionary projects of Zaha Hadid. One of the most remarkable can be found in Innsbruck, where - after she designed a ground-breaking ski-jump - she completed a visionary funicular with sculptural stations that have a 'new, fluid kind of spatiality'."
BMW Welt
Stephen Bayley, design critic
"Heroic, unreflective, audacious technological swagger. As technically flawless and superbly finished (and as arrogant) as a 7 Series limo. If architecture and branding are going to get muddled, this at least sets dizzying precedents of competence. At this very late stage in the car's journey through civilisation there is something weirdly magnificent about a perfect temple to tarnished values. It's a virtuous circle of brand-building. It reminds me of an 18th-century ideal city: a vision of what the world might be if it were designed by BMW."
Heathrow's Terminal 5
Tim Marlow, art historian
"I think Richard Rogers did a fantastic job with Heathrow's Terminal 5. There's absolutely no question that it is a great example of modern architecture. It's just a pity that its reputation has been tarnished by the incompetent people who are running it. As airports go I can see few that are more ambitious and more functional at the same time."
The Tyne Cot Centre, Belgium
Anthony Seldon, political historian
"The Tyne Cot is attached to the biggest British military cemetery [at Ypres], and is one of the most stunning buildings I've ever seen. It has echoes of other vast cemeteries on both sides of the Atlantic. It's the simplicity of it that strikes the visitor. Plain black and glass of the modern centre contrasts with the whiteness of the cemetery that was put up 90 years ago. It conveys the barrenness of death in a way that sympathises with the stark white cemetery against which it is located."
Beijing's "Bird's Nest" stadium
Jack Pringle, president-elect, Royal Institute of British Architects
"Herzog and de Meuron's work with the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has produced a completely new take on stadium design, which is very expressive of the Chinese culture and gives a new look to the 21st-century stadium for the Olympic Games. Stadiums until recently have tended to be engineering structures, designed practically, or as a concept of engineering. This is an artistic expression of a new national monument designed to say something about the nation and culture of the people it represents, and for a structure that's so chunky it's curiously beautiful and elegant."
- INDEPENDENT
