‘Well considered and humanly scaled’, local authority housing leads the way at Ely Court by Alison Brooks Architects. Photograph: Paul Riddle

Rowan Moore: best architecture of 2016

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It was a good year for council housing, African American culture and Herzog & de Meuron – and a bad one for garden bridges

Observer critics’ reviews of the year in full

The best news in the not-entirely-cheerful year of 2016, architecturally speaking, is that the finest new housing is being built by local authorities. Projects such as Alison Brooks’s Ely Court for the London borough of Brent, or similar works in the boroughs of Camden, Hackney and elsewhere, are showing that council homes do not have be the grim monoliths of legend. They are well considered and humanly scaled, with hospitable shared spaces, balconies you might actually want to sit on and other small but significant details. As central government is showing glimmers of realisation that volume housebuilders cannot meet the country’s needs alone, developments like these are part of the answer.

‘The grandest staircase in London’, in the Switch House extension to Tate Modern by Herzog & de Meuron. Photograph: View Pictures/Rex/Shutterstock

If the new council housing displayed quiet virtues, the same could not be said of either the gothic-flavoured Victoria Gate shopping centre in Leeds or Herzog & de Meuron’s extension to Tate Modern, a tower containing the grandest staircase in London. Nor of the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, also by Herzog & de Meuron, where the extravagant idea of perching a large concert hall on top of a large former warehouse was extravagantly realised.

In Washington the British architect David Adjaye formed part of the team that designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture, also not shy and retiring, which successfully pulled off the difficult feat of holding its own in the monumental surroundings of the National Mall. It opened in September, but its mission and values already seem to belong to another age.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Students of the building projects favoured by London’s former mayor, Boris Johnson, will have spotted certain tendencies – boosterism, implausible and contradictory promises, inattention to detail, inevitable disappointment when reality bites. In 2016 he transferred these qualities to rearranging the metaphorical architecture of Europe. Meanwhile the Johnson-backed garden bridge project, chief monument of haveyourcakeandeatism, became enmeshed, possibly fatally, in the consequences of its poor planning. It looks increasingly like a premonition of Brexit.

Architecture had its share in 2016’s roll of losses, with the premature death of Zaha Hadid, as remarkable a character as the profession has ever seen. Even those who questioned her work had to recognise both her creative force and her huge influence on the design of buildings.

Top 5

Switch House, Tate Modern, London SE1 by Herzog & de Meuron
Breathtaking “vertical” of stairs and halls with some nice art galleries attached.

Walmer Yard, courtyard detail of shutters partially open.

Walmer Yard, London W11 by Peter Salter/Crispin Kelly
Four intensely crafted houses: a labour of love by designer and developer.

Hastings Pier by dRMM
The rebuilding of the fire-wrecked pier does a lot with a little.

Victoria Gate, Leeds by Acme
Retail vulgarity done well.

Cowan Court, Churchill College, Cambridge by 6a
The Cambridge courtyard reinvented, in an all-timber construction.

Turkey

Thames garden bridge, London by Thomas Heatherwick
Not actually built, but nominated for the multiple absurdities of its conception and attempted realisation.

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