Stirling Prize-winning Salford building to be demolished
The Centenary Building, which won the inaugural design gong in 1996, will be bulldozed as part of the wider £2.5bn Crescent regeneration project.
The University of Salford-owned building was constructed to house the institution’s spatial, graphic, and industrial design department but has been vacant for almost a decade.
Designed by Hodder + Partners, the building is one of only two North West winners of the Stirling Prize in the 28-year history of the award. The other is the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, which won the award in 2014.
A spokesperson for the University of Salford said: “While the Centenary Building has been part of our university estate for a number of decades. Unfortunately, its ageing infrastructure means it no longer meets modern standards and requirements.
“It has now been vacant for a third of its built life. Careful consideration has been given to the history of the building, and the partnership, which includes Salford City Council, ECF and the University of Salford, intends to demolish the building as part of the comprehensive development of Adelphi Village.”
The 100-home Wilohaus is currently being constructed on the building’s former car park as part of the Adelphi Village plans. The nearby Farmer Norton car park is also earmarked for redevelopment.
The university’s announcement about the decision to demolish the Salford building comes after the Twentieth Century Society submitted an application to Historic England to have it listed.
If this is successful, the university’s plans to demolish the building could be scuppered.
Stephen Hodder, who designed the scheme, hopes this is the case.
“It is with great dismay that we received the news that Salford University intends to demolish the Centenary Building,” he said.
Hodder, who is a past chair of the Construction Industry Council’s climate change committee, said his dismay is “not borne out of nostalgia…or indeed the importance of the building to the development of our practice” but rather due to the environmental impact of demolishing the building.
“I simply cannot support the demolition of a building that is only thirty years old,” Hodder said.
The Crescent framework drawn up in 2021 to guide the redevelopment of 250 acres around the university said that “alternative uses for the building will be supported”.
“The facility could include uses including a GP, dentist practice, library, creche, and/or community space,” according to the framework.
Hodder added: “We’re not aware that there has been an exhaustive effort to re-purpose the building.
“For a university that promotes its sustainability credentials, the intention to demolish surely undermines the credibility of its policy. We urge it to reconsider, and hope the architectural community and wider industry collectively exclaim its concerns.”
If architects don’t want buildings they design to be demolished later on, have they tried designing buildings which are beautiful and respected as such by their neighbours? The buildings which people fight hard to keep are often objectively considered beautiful. Maybe there’s a lesson there.
This building offers a wasteful use of the land it sits on, is surrounded by a moat of car parking, and has a massive windowless facade on one side. It looks like a spaceship, not a building which makes an effort to sit harmoniously with its surroundings. Clearing it away to make space for something more human scale, with some active frontage, and – erm – windows on all sides would be beneficial for the surrounding area.
By Anonymous
Looks more like a contender for the Carbuncle Cup. Knock it down please.
By GQ
“Unfortunately, its ageing infrastructure means it no longer meets modern standards and requirements. It has now been vacant for a third of its built life.”
Sounds to me that the architects failed in their duties…
By Anonymous
I’ve never rated this badly massed building. And not sure it’s easily adaptable.
The other North West Stirling winner – The Everyman Theatre Liverpool – on the other hand, is very well designed and with a natural ventilation system. It’s witty too.
By Rye
This building is poorly designed from a usability perspective and hasn’t stood test of time. It needs to go.
By Stuart
Clissold leisure centre, National Wildflower Centre, The Centenary Building. These buildings have one thing in common.
By Anonymous
Well this is an embarrassment for Salford, Hodder and especially Sterling.
How can something win that prize but only be operational for 20 years, and then be totally unadaptable for any other purpose. Why did it win the award in the first place?
Also, hilarious what department it was built to house but then flunked 😂
By Anonymous
Vacant for almost a decade, but plans have been submitted to Historic England to have it listed on order to protect it?
Surely the whole point of a building is to house stuff? Clearly, if it has been vacant for a year than it has failed miserably at the first hurdle.
Get rid and build something better please. We shouldn’t be preserving useless buildings. The country isn’t a museum!
By Anonymous
How a building so disconnected from its realm, surrounded by a sea of tarmac ever won an award is beyond me. How a building so disconnected from its realm that also has the appearance of a low grade motorway service station or call centre on a business park is proposterous.
No, we don’t want to demolish buildings with embodied carbon where they can have a useful forward life. But to save something that is ugly and poorly designed will only hold back an area from much needed regeneration or diminish its potential.
By Anonymous
By all accounts a terribly designed building, massively rushed to meet funding deadlines at the time. Not sad to see it go.
By Bradford
I studied in this building from 99-02, felt new and fresh and forward thinking at the time considering it was opposite a crumbling old school building we still had to use. That said the rooms and the way the building worked was really fragmented, didn’t encourage collaboration and was quite boxy and small. It’s a shame it can’t be repurposed but can’t imagine as what given its internal layouts.
By CityCentre
It’s been empty for a third of its existence. Maybe it’s just be a badly designed building that is not fit for purpose or is not easily adaptable for an alternative use.
By Anonymous
I worked in this building and it was freezing in the winter, we boiled in the summer. It was excessively noisy – from people on the stairs and walkways, to people generally milling around. And when the fans went on during fire alarms that were supposed to suck the smoke to the ceiling it created a vacuum so it was really difficult to pull the main doors open.
By Anonymous
@November 11, 2024 at 11:53 pm
By Anonymous
I couldn’t write this better myself.
@November 11, 2024 at 8:37 pm
By Anonymous
And @November 11, 2024 at 5:13 pm
By Stuart
Buildings are not solely for utility. They much also provide joy for their users and observers and strive for beauty or visual complexity, regardless of architectural style.
As the late Roger Scruton mentioned, solely ‘useful’ buildings are often useless.
Like this one.
By Rye
The ghost of Roger Scruton is here making comments on ‘beauty’
By Anonymous
Not demolishing an obsolescent and dysfunctional building has to be the best non sequitur of ‘sustainable’ yet! Occasionally architects should look at themselves in a mirror and ask what do they see.
By Anonymous
It’s an outrage and just like your post states, it prides itself on its environmental credentials. Yet it is eating up the park and green space around it. 199s of ancient tress have been destroyed and hides behind a small park and slowly swallow up the adjacent park.
By Daniel
Mr Hodder’s ego is making the noise here.. Surely judges should be looking at the area its positioned and its longevity when awarding a building the prize. Mr Hodder, you’ve a had a good run, you’ve been able to drop into conversation “we won the Sterling prize you know..” but stop, look around and realise its a service station at the back of a car park that’s been unused for ten (yes ten) years.. Unless you can move it to Forton Service Station, they’d take it.
By G McCain
Presumably, carbon assessments have been carried out to show the carbon footprint if it was kept versus demo and rebuild. It’s not my favourite building, but it’s also not my least favourite, and I think that all options should be explored before everything in the Crescent Regeneration area is simply demolished.
By Anon
Absolutely absurd thinking and decision making. Have I missed something……I thought most industry professional and further educational institutional mindsets were firmly focused on Carbon efficiencies and against being wasteful of resources. I find it implausible there is no way to reuse this asset!
By Graham
its difficult to take the Universities seriously desperately trying to raise tuition fees with things like this going on
By Anonymous
The UK property industry is primarily driven by commercial interests.
Commercial interests cannot be relied upon to independently prioritise the re-use of buildings when they have finished with them.
Design teams are providing a service and mostly design what they are told to design (although non-the-less have a responsibility to steer designs).
This is precisely why we need a robust and well resourced system for controlling development (planning and building control etc.).
One part of this could be mandatory calculation, and public reporting, of embodied carbon for all buildings; existing and new. Then mandatory consideration of net whole-life carbon impact of any intervention as part of obtaining permissions, with benchmarks included in local plans to control overall impact.
If this was the case, the evidence-based consideration of the wasteful treatment of embodied energy could be considered alongside other decision making metrics and weighted as seen fit. Without this, the real impact can only be considered anecdotally and it seems is often ignored in the face of noisy campaigning about short term gain. Hopefully we can improve this in the next iteration of controls.
By HopefulDesigner
There is no way Steve failed in any of his duties as an architect. This building was designed to a strict brief and came out of the blocks like a supreme athlete, honed and adventurous, sleek and remarkable. It still looks wonderful and should certainly be put to better use. If I had the influence, I’d get the MSA in there rather than in the building they are currently tolerating.
By Steve Wall
Utterly astonishing. If this is outdated because if it’s age, then pity help Maxwell!
By Allan Ashworth
It might help people form a view if the photo used in pretty much all the coverage wasn’t the architect’s dramatic publicity photo from when it was new, rather than one showing something that now looks quite ordinary, hemmed in behind an old warehouse.
Even so, not good for an institution like Salford University that claims to be a leader in sustainability to be binning a fairly new building to make a commercial development site slightly bigger. Surely they could have found an alternative use long ago, once it became clear they were concentrating on the main campus?
By Anonymous