This year’s Stirling Prize celebrates the true breadth of what architecture is – and can be

This year’s Stirling Prize winner is not without controversy. In the couple of days between the winner being announced and my sitting down to write this column, I have heard multiple slightly confused radio hosts querying whether the Elizabeth Line is architecture – or is it, in fact, engineering?

I have often written of the joy I find in the diversity of the British architectural profession, and, for me, this winner showcases it magnificently. For the wider public, architects are often assumed to work largely on ‘Grand Designs’-style jobs – private houses or one-off ‘special’ buildings. The wider profession of polymath and collaborative professionals working on public infrastructure, retrofit, refurbishment, urban planning, and hundreds of carefully considered and crafted ‘background’ buildings slips slightly below the radar of public awareness.

This year’s Stirling shortlist showcased, in particular, two projects that better demonstrate this breadth of practice. Allies and Morrison and Porphyrios Associates’ Kings Cross masterplan offered a glimpse of triumphantly thoughtful urban repair at a grand scale, and Grimshaw, Maynard, Equation, and AtkinsRéalis’ Elizabeth Line offers a masterclass in collaboration between architecture, engineering, and a myriad of other disciplines to realise complex and vital infrastructure.

Even the citations of these projects demonstrate this breadth – these are not single buildings designed and ruled over by a single architect with (usually his) name on the door. This is architecture created by a cast of thousands. Significant skill is required to collaborate effectively at this scale without losing clarity of thought and design.

These architect-led multidisciplinary teams showcase one of the great strengths of the architectural profession – its breadth of knowledge. Historically, architects were polymath professionals closely integrated with the building crafts. They had knowledge of engineering, planning, and material science. They worked on everything from theatre sets to military siege engines and the supervision of stone quarrying. The practice of architecture had broad applications.

Architecture has always been a team sport between enlightened clients, visionary designers, and skilled craftspeople

A perfect example of this is the way the ancient Greeks – Plato and Aristotle included – used the verb ‘to architect’. In their writings, ‘architecting’ meant to show civic and intellectual leadership – the application of knowledge in practical ways for the common good.

From the Industrial Revolution onwards, however, there has been a drift towards categorisation, to closer definition of what an architect is and isn’t. The trend led to campaigns to protect the title and function of architecture. We linked ourselves very closely to the purely built – usually just to buildings, and a subset of buildings at that. The practical and civic application of knowledge has drifted towards the periphery of what we consider a good architect to be.

I have long held the opinion, though, that this rush to define us too closely led to the hollowing out of the profession. The historical architectural role varied; it shapeshifted as economies and empires grew and shrank around it, encompassing much and rejecting little. In our modern squabbles about whether we are humanity or science, art or profession, we have missed the sheer joy that we are neither – and both.

To sit in this space is perhaps uncomfortably close to suggesting that we aren’t really anything – that we exist in the not-quite-there, and the just-out-of-sight. However, perhaps there is no better place to sit for the visualiser of the as-yet-unrealised. Perhaps it is also from here that we allow our profession to reimagine itself in our changing world – and to widen the embrace of the profession to welcome the skills and talents that enable projects such as Kings Cross and the Elizabeth Line to happen.

Architecture has always been a team sport between enlightened clients, visionary designers, and skilled craftspeople – and they didn’t always just build houses, commercial developments, and museums. It is a joy to see this so publicly recognised in the Stirling Prize, with such teams succeeding at this level. Architecture isn’t just buildings, and the practice of architectural knowledge has vastly broad applications. In my opinion, the future of the profession will be found in embracing this ancient truth.