Lion Green Road: South London residential quarter wins RIBA Stirling Prize 2026

What happened

The RIBA Stirling Prize 2026 — the annual award of the Royal Institute of British Architects — has been awarded to the **Lion Green Road** project. It is a residential complex in Coulsdon (South London), designed by **Mary Duggan Architects together with RUFFARCHITECTS** and commissioned by **Croydon Council**.

The prize is awarded to a building that RIBA considers to have made a significant contribution to the development of architecture.

The project in numbers

• •**157 homes** within the complex;
• •**five residential blocks**;
• •a mix of **privately owned and social rented housing** in a single quarter;
• •the site is a **former car park**.

The very structure of the project is telling: it is neither a mono-functional “investor” asset nor an isolated social housing block, but a mixed quarter where different forms of ownership and tenure coexist within a single urban-planning logic.

Why it matters

The Stirling Prize traditionally captures not so much the formal merits of an individual building as the state of the profession. The victory of a municipal housing project on the site of a car park in a London suburb shifts the emphasis from striking public buildings to the **typical housing task**: density, affordability, the role of local authorities as clients, and the quality of ordinary urban fabric.

Professional context

*Below is general industry context, not facts from the original source.*

Mid-rise residential quarters are a segment where industrial construction methods have been actively discussed in recent years: prefabricated systems, panelised and modular solutions. Mass timber (CLT, LVL, glued-laminated structures) is of interest in this niche above all as a way to reduce building weight, speed up assembly and lower the carbon footprint of the structure — which is critical when building on the redevelopment of former car parks and other man-made sites with constraints on loads and logistics.

An important caveat: **the source material does not specify the material of the load-bearing structures and façades of Lion Green Road**. One cannot attribute a timber frame to the project without confirmation. But the very framing of the task — dense affordable housing from a municipal client — is exactly the scenario in which mass timber will compete with concrete and steel in the coming years.

What to look at in the project

• •how private and social entrances, courtyards and shared spaces are distributed;
• •how the five blocks form the street frontage and internal courtyard spaces;
• •how density has been resolved on the compact site of a former car park;
• •how the project can be scaled to other council sites.

Full analysis — via the ArchDaily link in the original source.