The Great Glass House, National Botanic Garden of Wales, Carmarthenshire

Designed by Norman Foster and Partners, the Great Glass House is the centrepiece of the new National Botanic Garden and is set in the 568-acre landscaped park of Middleton Hall, an 18th-century building demolished between the wars. The shallow arc of the Glass House’s dome, inclined towards the south, fits gently into the surrounding rolling hills and seems to change in scale depending on the viewer’s standpoint.  
    The judges commented that “although it is too early to judge the success of the internal landscaping, the buikling itself is delightfully conceived and rigorously skilfull. It is, at least in part, to the building’s credit that the Great Glass House has attracted far more visitors than originally anticipated.”
  

Restoration of Ty Mawr, Powys

The restoration of Ty Mawr was designed by Garner Southall Partnership, who are based in Mid Wales. Ty Mawr was built around 1460 as the home of a wealthy medieval household, but by 1970 what remained of it was being used as a cowshed. At the core, however, were the remains of a fine timber-framed medieval hall-house, once common in the area but now rare. To protect this historically important structure, it was decided to entirely reconstruct the building around it, bringing the house back to what it might have been in 1635.
   The judges commented: “The restoration of Ty Mawr represents an amazing transformation — ‘before’ photograohs show a derelict structure with a corrugated iron roof standing in a sea of mud. Although this extraordinary house is now lived in by tenants, it is regularly open to the public, and therefore a great communal asset.”