If there’s a recurrent theme in this year’s Mies van der Rohe European Prize for Contemporary Architecture, it is surely imaginative renovation and transformation. This was most notable at Le Grand Parc, in Bordeaux, where three slab blocks of social housing were given a new lease of life, or the re-making of a communist-era square in Tirana as a tranquil oasis in the middle of an otherwise chaotic city.

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We also had the task of selecting five finalists as potential prizewinners, after a lot of discussion and argument. Some of my fellow jurors, for example, suggested that the scheme carried out in Tirana’s Skanderbeg Square wasn’t even “architecture”. But I reminded them that the Danish urbanist, Jan Gehl, had long maintained that the spaces between buildings were as important as the buildings.

For me, the transformation of Skanderbeg Square into a “people place” was not only impressive in itself, but could also be an inspiration to other former communist countries in eastern Europe on how to turn big squares once used for military parades or communist rallies into attractive urban spaces where citizens could chill out, even though all the streets around them may be choked by traffic.

As for the three 14-storey slab blocks in Le Grand Parc in Bordeaux, the city’s largest late-1960s social housing scheme, I was gobsmacked by how it had been transformed by the addition of winter gardens at every level, even while all of the residents were still living there. And it turned out to be a lot cheaper than the original plan to demolish these blocks and re-house everyone elsewhere.

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