Royal institute gives top prize to architect derided by Charles

Leading British architects escalated their row with Prince Charles today when they gave their top London prize to his bête noire Lord Rogers.

The Maggie's Centre for cancer sufferers at Charing Cross Hospital, designed by Lord Rogers and his partners, was awarded London Building of the Year by the Royal Institute of British Architecture.

The honour is public vindication for the architect whose modernist design for a £1billion housing scheme at the former Chelsea Barracks has been condemned by Prince Charles.

The Prince had written to representatives of the Qatari royal family, developers of the site, urging them to drop Lord Rogers' plan in favour of a more traditionalist design. The RIBA said the Prince's intervention in March "compromised the democratic process".

Yet where Prince Charles labelled Lord Rogers' barracks scheme "unsympathetic," RIBA judges applauded the architect for his sympathetic design for Maggie's Centre. They said the building by Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners was "a haven", and added: "Their achievement is in having created a informal, home-like sanctuary to help patients learn to live — or die — with cancer, beautifully." The building is now in the running for the RIBA's most prestigious architecture award in Britain, the Stirling Prize, this October.

The architects' body also honoured a mix of offices, public spaces and private homes among the 28 awards for the London region. These included the transformed St Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square, Kings Place arts centre and offices at King's Cross, a glass house inside Highgate Cemetery, a restoration of Unilever's Grade II listed Thirties headquarters, the City of London Information Centre in St Paul's churchyard and the tree walk at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew.

Clarence House today declined to comment on Lord Rogers' award.