It was the right choice to give Grafton Architects' Kingston University London this year's Stirling Prize, says Catherine Slessor, but the award is still struggling to find its purpose.

So Grafton Architects have now collected the set. Following the Pritzker Architecture Prize and RIBA Gold Medal, the 2021 Stirling Prize has been awarded to the Town House at Kingston University London, one of the darker horses on a shortlist of frankly bewildering range and scale, encompassing everything from a featherlight wisp of a bridge to an arboreal mosque.
Grafton was certainly not the bookies' favourite ? that dubious distinction went to Marks Barfield's Cambridge mosque. But in resisting the more "televisual" blandishments of Amin Taha's Clerkenwell cliff face, the wispy Tintagel bridge and the arboreal mosque, this year's Stirling jury, headed by Norman Foster ? who knows a thing or two about arboreal structures ? made the right choice. Kingston feels more restrained and suburban, in keeping with its peripheral London locale
Kingston forms part of a remarkable series of buildings Grafton have designed for educational establishment from Milan to Toulouse. Arguably it's one of their more understated projects, compared with the swagger and heft of Lima's University of Technology and Engineering, with its vertiginous cat's cradle of balconies, beams and floor slabs, and the Marshall Institute for the London School of Economics, currently erupting from the south-west corn...