The Greenest in the UK

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London has unveiled this year’s winners of the annual RIBA awards. Recognized as 2015’s best British projects in the UK, these 37 structures include a wide variety of architecture types from contemporary private homes to buildings in higher education. We’ve rounded up ten of the greenest RIBA-award winning buildings of 2015. Among them are ten projects awarded for sustainability, but in this review is given a description of only nine of them.

The Right To Air Space
The structural objective of the UK Headquarters of WWF is clear: a large barrel tethered by honest steel sections and connections, giving it the appearance of a lightweight tented hangar structure – Hopkins at their best. Large rotating wind cowls and PV panels suggest a sustainable approach to the design. It floats – incongruously perhaps given its function - above Woking’s town car park, which predates it. But no apology is needed: this is the most successful air-rights building ever.

The timber soffits hint at a domesticity that is rare in a corporate building. Above a well-detailed suspended concrete podium, the building houses 340 staff in a wide, open-plan office environment over two floors of meeting rooms, auditorium, public interactive zone and classrooms – and allowing lovely slot views of trees and canal.

The site for the new Living Planet Centre, which is located within the Town Centre, sits alongside the Basingstoke Canal and the brief required that the existing public car park at ground level be retained. The new building sits on a raised in-situ concrete podium, whose perimeter has been planted with shrubs, trees and flowers. A new bridge from the town centre leads to a public piazza at podium level, connecting through to an internal public exhibition space.

At ground level, the existing trees have been retained and a new wetlands area created to provide a wildlife corridor from the Basingtsoke Canal to Horsell Moor, enhancing the public realm onto the canal.

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Materials provided by the Royal Institute of British Architects