Alsop, William

Alsop, William (1947– ). English architect, he established Alsop & Lyall in 1981, and in 2000 the practice was renamed Alsop Architects. He designed (1991) Le Grand Bleu (the Hôtel du Département des Bouches-du-Rhône), Marseilles, France (completed 1994), and later (2000) won the Stirling Prize for the Peckham Library and Media Centre, London. Fashionable for, among other things, his bright colours and his use of pods, his works include North Greenwich Station on the Jubilee line, London (1996–9), The Earth Centre, Yorks. (1999), The Palestra, Southwark, London (2001–4), Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto (2000–4—a ‘table-top’ building on stilts, not universally admired), the Medical School, Queen Mary College, London (2001–5), Herons Quay Station, London Docklands (2001–3), Victoria House, London (completed 2003), Düsseldorf Harbour Tower, Germany (completed 2002), Cardiff Bay Barrage buildings (completed 2000), renovation and regeneration of the Aylesbury Estate, Southwark, London (2002), the urban entertainment centre (pop concert-hall, hotel, and retail unit with restaurant, café, etc.) at Almere, The Netherlands (part of Koolhaas's ‘corrections’ there), and the visual arts complex, Goldsmith College, New Cross, London (2002–5). His huge community arts centre, called The Public, West Bromwich, in the West Midlands of England, essentially a big box filled with blobs, some of which burst through the façade, was completed in 2005.

Bibliography

Gooding (1992);
K. Powell et al. (2002a);
Richard Weston ;
Spens (1994)