Arts buildings win architecture prize

The National Theatre and Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery have both won National Awards in the annual competition run by RIBA, the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The National Theatre’s award follows a comprehensive £80m makeover which included a new block containing design studios and set-building workshops. Judges particularly praised architects Haworth Tompkins – who last year won the coveted Sterling prize for Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre – for their “assured re-organisation of the front-of-house areas [which] gives the theatre a clarity and a sense of arrival it has never had before”.

Of the £15m extension to the 19th-century Whitworth Gallery by the London architecture studio MUMA, they said: “The worst of the 1960s additions, such as suspended ceilings, have been stripped out and earlier spatial relationships reinstated; the gallery now embraces the park.”

Both buildings are now competing for a place on the 2015 Stirling prize shortlist. The Whitworth has also been selected as a finalist for the Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year 2015.