What do the RIBA Awards say about architecture?

摘要

What is the relationship between buildings that gain a RIBA Award, and architectural output as a whole in any given year? If the question seems odd, or even pointless, it can be put another way. To what extent is good, or even outstanding, architecture influencing the quality of supposedly ordinary lives in supposedly ordinary places? And what might a small, ostensibly unremarkable development in Woodbridge, Suffolk, have to do with these questions? The profession should certainly hold up its artefacts for judgement, and the hazards of praise, damnation, or irony; and design excellence must, by definition, be exceptional. But, in the case of British architecture in 2013, we might also wonder if exceptional means admirably rare, or in some way profoundly isolated.