2015 National Architecture Awards: International Award

Jury citation

The jury was impressed by this impeccably detailed glass pavilion, which has been added to Woodchester House, a heritage-listed eighteenth-century Georgian mansion in Gloucestershire, England. The program for the room includes an entry, bathroom, laundry and living area with a fireplace inset into a stone wall, all of which is linked by a twelve-metre-long gallery to an existing outbuilding that adjoins the main house and contains a kitchen and dining room. The Garden Room makes innovative use of a glass roof resting on glass beams in the linking gallery, which gives the structure almost complete transparency. Within the Garden Room itself, thin blade concrete columns support a concrete roof, and glass is cleverly used again to emphasize the idea of a solid parasol placed next to a concrete wall. Impossibly tall (five-metre-high) glazed doors then slide away at the pavilion’s corners, dissolving any sense of intrusive mass. This project demonstrates a deft blend of high technology and contemporary materials with existing stone walls and framed views of a garden landscape. It is a compositional gem.