The Whitworth wins an RIBA National Award

Manchester’s gallery in the park celebrates as it wins a second prestigious architectural award

We are delighted to announce that the gallery has just been granted another award – in the RIBA National Awards 2015. The Whitworth is among 37 winners drawn from across the UK. Handed out to new buildings that are considered to set the standard for good architecture, this year’s winners range from private homes to a shoe polish factory that has been converted into offices. The list also includes one of our Oxford Road neighbours: Feilden Clegg Bradley's student union for Manchester Metropolitan University.

This is an award that comes only a few months after the gallery was given the coveted Building of the Year prize in the RIBA North West Regional Awards, and as we await the announcement of the winner of the Museum of the Year award, for which we have been shortlisted.

The RIBA National Award recognises the exceptional work undertaken by our architects, MUMA (McInnes Usher McKnight Architects) in the gallery’s recent £15m development. As the RIBA itself comments: “This extension to the 19th century gallery on the edge of Whitworth Park builds on John Bickerdike’s 1960’s work in a way that on entering seems subtle in the extreme but then gradually builds outward in a sympathetic but entirely original way.”

“The architects, in close collaboration with the client, have allowed the new architecture to emerge seamlessly from the existing as an integral yet individualistic part of the whole assembly, and produced carefully crafted spaces of international standard.”
Our thanks, as ever, go to MUMA, the University of Manchester, the Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England, our supporters and patrons – and all those who made our vision for a reborn, 21st-century Whitworth possible.