Cricket is back!

The first Investec Test Match  between England and New Zealand begins today at Lord’s Cricket Ground and the world’s press will be watching from its Media Centre, the Stirling Prize-winning building designed by Future Systems.

The objective of the Media Centre’s design was to respect and savour the essential nature of Lord’s while bringing to it a building that heralded the coming millennium upon completion in 1999 and provided the most elegant and state-of-the-art media centre in the world. It captured the public imagination with its form and function, transforming a generic brief into an elegant solution, made possible by the marriage of conceptual with technical inventiveness.

The first all-aluminium, semi-monocoque building in the world, it represents a breakthrough, not just in the creation of a new three-dimensional aesthetic, but in its method of construction.

This building was built and fitted out not by the construction industry but a boatyard, using the very latest advances in boat building technology.

Raised 15 metres above the ground, the aerodynamic contours of the building reflect the sweep of the plan of the ground with the enclosing skin formed by a smooth, white, seamless shell.

The west-facing glazing is inclined to avoid any glare or reflections, providing unobstructed views of the game for the world’s media.