Mace's St Mary Magdalene wins Building's Project of the Year Award

Media

07/05/2010

At the 16th annual Building Awards, Mace has won Building's Project of the Year 2010. Mace's Ropemaker Place project was acknowledged with a "highly commended" for the WRAP Award and was runner-up to the Ashmolean Museum project in the Project of the Year category.

Below are the comments from the judges:

Building's project of the year
Winner - Ashmolean Museum
"Rick Mather Architects and Mace Group entered this bold project, which involved flattening half of the existing Ashmolean and attaching a six-storey extension to the 19th-century, grade I-listed Cockerell building, doubling the museum's capacity at a stroke. Classical and modern link seamlessly. Visitors go through the grand entrance of the Cockerell and into a new atrium with a grand staircase spanning five floors. They then wander over link bridges spanning double-height galleries, glimpsing other parts of the collection through glass panels. This provides a link between the collections - which span from Egyptian antiquities to 20th-century paintings - and helps visitors orientate themselves. Generous natural lighting also helps visitors find their way around and cuts energy use. Internal space has been maximised in this height-restricted project by putting ducting in the walls rather than the ceilings and using display cabinets to form part of the walls. Externally, the Cockerell building is still very much the public face of the Ashmolean - but the extension, hidden behind existing facades, provides an exhibit in its own right."

Runner-Up - Ropemaker Place, London
"British Land's most sustainable building to date has a BREEAM 'excellent' rating and a B-rated energy performance certificate. The 20-storey City office has an innovative facade that appears to be all glass but 60% of it is actually covered in solid panels that cut its cooling load 25%. The building steps back in four stages to provide attractive planted terraces. Two teams delivered the project, led by Arup Associates and Mace, and they did it for 5% less than predicted."

WRAP Award for Sustainable construction
Highly commended - Mace Group
"At British Land's Ropemaker Place, Mace demonstrated that you can keep a tight grip on site waste even on a high-spec city office block. The offsite manufacture of such elements as flooring and washrooms helped to control the amount of materials coming onto site, and Mace's close collaboration with its recycling contractor ensured that a minimal amount of waste left it - in fact, recycling rates were up to 90% and the compaction of waste on site cut traffic movements by 50%. Having signed up to the Halving Waste to Landfill commitment last year, Mace is already becoming an evangelist for the cause with clients, which is the necessary next step in eliminating waste from the start of the development process."