Mappa Mundi home is building of year

The library built to house the 13th century Mappa Mundi yesterday beat off competition from a public lavatory to be named as the Royal Fine Art Commission's Building of the Year.

The Chained Library at Hereford Cathedral, which took the award ahead of the lavatory at Stratford-upon-Avon, was designed by the architects Whitfield Partners. The pounds 1.5m building was completed in April last year and houses the cathedral archive as well as the celebrated animal-skin map saved for the nation with the help of John Paul Getty's millions.

Announcing the award for the "outstanding architectural contribution of the year", Lord St John of Fawsley, chairman of the Commission, lamented the poor reputation of contemporary architects.

"There is a stain on the British imagination when it considers contemporary architecture, which has been imprinted by the dreary iconoclasm and in some cases monstrous creations of the Sixties. As a result, for many people contemporary in architectural terms has come to mean ugly or bad of inferior."

Other winners in the Building of the Year Award 1997, sponsored by British Sky Broadcasting, were Little Britain, in east London, in the restoration and conservation category, and the Oxo Tower Wharf, on London's South Bank, in the urban regeneration section.

Buildings short-listed for the main award were the Avonbank Gardens public lavatories in Stratford-upon-Avon; the Meadowbank Club at Cable & Wireless in Twickenham, south-west London; No 3 The Square, in Uxbridge, Middlesex; and Matthew Gloag & Son's new headquarters building near Perth in Scotland.

The award for the Chained Library will be a pleasing postscript to a saga which began at the cathedral almost 10 years ago.

Faced with a repairs bill of pounds 7m to the crumbling Norman building, the authorities decided to sell the Mappa Mundi, one of the largest maps of its kind. But the proposal provoked a public outcry and the map was withdrawn from auction after a pounds 3m rescue package was funded by the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the philanthropic Mr Getty.