BUILDING Town and gown: Niall McLaughlin at Somerville ... · St John’s College). Typological research from this period evolved an understanding of a Above The oak-clad bay windows

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A student residence drawson picturesque planningtraditions to make a new street for the city.

Report by Tom Holbrook.Photographs: Nick Kane.

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After the Enlightenment, city authoritiessought to confine those sections of societyconsidered ‘other’ to institutions on theurban periphery. By the nineteenth centurythese colonies of the insane, the sick and thecriminally inclined were joined by womendesiring a university education.

At Oxbridge, women’s colleges were estab-lished on the edge of town: Girton College,Cambridge (1873), and Somerville College,Oxford (1879), were isolated from the universities that they were part of, as a prophylactic against moral corruption.

As these universities grow, these peripheralcolleges (now mixed of course) find them-selves enveloped by the institutions that oncemarginalised them. Girton is adjacent to amajor north-west expansion of the university,while at Somerville, the transplantation ofthe Radcliffe Infirmary creates the conditionsfor a major piece of university infrastructure.

Behind its original Palladian ensemble, theInfirmary – Somerville’s northern neigh-bour – expanded in that ultra-contingentmanner peculiar to hospitals, bringing aseries of lean-to backland services (mortuary,

laundries, brewhouse) to the boundary wallwith the college. The Infirmary’s spasmodicexpansion was halted by the decision of thehospital trust to move out to the suburbs, and the sale of the four-hectare site to theuniversity in 2003.

The University commissioned RafaelViñoly Architects to masterplan the RadcliffeObservatory Quarter (ROQ) in 2005. Theresultant beaux-arts plan was widely criticised,its formal approach being a curiously subur-ban response to a site where the essentialopportunity is to become more urban.Viñoly’s gestural planning imagines new faculties as a series of self-referential figures arrayed around boulevards. TheMathematical Institute, designed by Viñoly, iscurrently on site; this will be joined by theSchool of Government (Herzog & deMeuron) and others in a phased realisationthat is highly dependant on private donors.

Town and gown: Niall McLaughlin at Somerville College, Oxford

Left, right The two student accommodation buildings make onewhole side of a new street, and a new northern entrance intoSomerville College. Key: 1 Walton Street, 2 West Building (NMA), 3 Somerville College quadrangle, 4 East Building (NMA), 5 proposed Mathematical Institute, 6 Radcliffe Infirmary, 7 outpatients building, 8 East West Link, 9 Woodstock Road.Above Four stair cores are capped by timber-framed lanterns.

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For my journey to Oxford I was lentPevsner’s posthumously published VisualPlanning and the Picturesque. The book visually plots three sequences throughOxford, in support of Pevsner’s thesis that a particular strength in English planningdraws on and adapts ideas of the picturesque,and is open to a certain sort of responsivepragmatism, rather than the dream of overallcontrol implied by a ‘masterplan’. McLaughlin’s approach to planning repre-

sents a subtle corruption of the original mas-terplan’s bombast, drawing on careful obser-vation of local conditions. Taking inspirationfrom the same Oxford sequences as Pevsner,McLaughlin planned the new street as a

Left Current Radcliffe Observatory Quarter plan; location planshowing visual links; East Building typical floor plan. The 6m-wideby 175m-long parcel of land ceded by the University was just wideenough to allow one student room and a connecting passageway.It was not possible to make individual entrances into the newbuilding from the north. The student rooms will connect back into existing college buildings as the phased project progresses. Key: 1 House Building, 2 Darbishire Building, 3 courtyard, 4 proposed link to Somerville College, 5 study bedroom, 6 kitchen,7 stair tower, 8 corridor, 9 East West Link.

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For Somerville, the hospital’s removalbrought the opportunity of a fourth side. Thecollege negotiated with the university on thecreation of a frontage to the street proposedby the masterplan, winning a few metres ofspace alongside a largely blind north wall. Ina joint selection process, the college appoint-ed Niall McLaughlin Architects to developplans for a new range of student rooms, whilethe university appointed the practice tosupervise the realisation of the new street.The college’s brief for the resulting 175-

metre-long by six-metre-wide site was for 68undergraduate rooms, with eight rooms on acorridor sharing a kitchen.

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engagement with the city. Towards the col-lege the architect has aligned the floors of thenew buildings with those across the flank wall,allowing the potential for connection. Thepractice has built soft spots into this wall foreasy removal: McLaughlin calls these ‘time-bombs’ and they are located in the collegestock most likely to require future change.This anticipation of the future while payingclose attention to what exists brings aninsightful dynamic – both to the scheme, butalso to the very idea of a masterplan. In con-trast to Viñoly’s specificity, this mode of plan-ning offers something more contingent,capable of both responding to changingneed while revealing and drawing on what isalready there.Somerville has impressive form in definingand enriching its perimeter. In the 1960s, thecollege commissioned a triad of buildingsfrom Philip Dowson at Arup Associates. Thefirst pair, the Fry and Vaughan buildings,establish graduate housing above an arcadeof shops along Little Clarendon Street, help-ing to create a busier, more urban street fromwhat was something of a backwater.

These two blocks, together with the laterWolfson building on the western boundary,are developments of Arup Associates’research into college rooms (culminating inthe wonderful Sir Thomas White Building atSt John’s College). Typological research fromthis period evolved an understanding of a

Above The oak-clad bay windows are ‘a contemporary restatement of thethemes of Phillip Dowson’s WolfsonBuilding at Somerville’. Much of the enve-lope was prefabricated to achieve a high level of airtightness (phs: NMA). Below Sections through East Building accommodation and stair core.

series of episodic spaces, each one set up onsignificant juxtapositions, framed anddenied views and surprises. The rooms arearrayed in two buildings – three storeys tothe east, four storeys to the west – each book-ended by tall stair towers which terminate inglazed lanterns. The buildings are separatedby a new northern gate, linking the collegewith the Observatory Quarter. McLaughlin’s work is doubly anticipatory:to the north, the range creates one edge towhat will eventually be a street, steering laterphases of the masterplan towards greater

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Above, left Circulation spaces, in which electrical andlighting loads are minimised by the use of occupancy sensors.

students and the conference trade – morelike hotel rooms, and more comfortable forthat, this nevertheless results in less interest-ing and variable typological possibilities.

The new rooms are generous and well-made, benefitting both from early liaisonwith the college maintenance team, and fromthe practice’s own experience with timberconstruction. The combination of a heavybrick frame with rooms articulated by timberbays references Louis Kahn’s library atExeter, New Hampshire, imported from NewEngland to Oxford via McLaughlin’s tutorShane de Blacam, who worked with Kahn.The reference works well here, particularlyfrom the inside, where rooms benefit greatlyfrom the bay’s carefully made outlook, wherea window seat and desk, view and ventilation,are combined in a sophisticated piece of join-ery. Externally, the lit and occupied studyrooms will enliven and overlook the street ina way that the faculty buildings on the otherside probably won’t.

student room as a four-part entity, operatingbetween the demands of work, sleep, storageand a bay window, where – by steppingbeyond the building line – the individualcould connect with both the totality of thebuilding, and with the quad or the streetbeyond. This thinking derived from contem-poraneous concerns about student lonelinessand self-identity within the institution.

The bay window is a motif in McLaughlin’swork too, allowing students to have anoblique relationship with the new street whileletting sunlight to reach these north-facingrooms. Unlike the Arup buildings where, formoral fibre, students were coerced into shar-ing common bathrooms, these rooms are en-suite to suit the expectations both of today’s

The use of brick at Somerville stems fromthe high Victorian fascination with brick insti-tutions. Redolent of hearth and home, italludes to the domestic: the correct provinceof even highly-educated ladies. This Victorianalliance of morality and material is clearest atWaterhouse’s Girton, but Somerville too hasits share of red brick, which McLaughlin hascarefully matched. Loadbearing masonry isused as a framing exoskeleton, referencingboth the broader Oxford gothic tradition,and the structural rationalism of Dowson’sprecast concrete structures for the college.

The practice’s eye on the larger-scale play isalso evident here – the new buildings line a


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street that will connect Jericho, the red-brickformer working neighbourhood, with KebleCollege (whose high Anglican architect,William Butterfield, claimed that he had ‘amission to give dignity to brick’), a red threadthrough this northern part of town.

Curiously, the relationship between build-ing project and the broader setting seems

Tom Holbrook is a director of architectureand urban design practice 5th Studio,whose projects include a graduate hostelat St Catharine’s College Cambridge andthe design of the Lea River Park, south of the London 2012 Olympic site.

weakest at ground level, where projectingstudy rooms have an uncomfortable relation-ship with the street – an alternative treatmentmight have been more robust here, perhapsin the manner of Kahn’s Centre for BritishArt at Yale, or indeed Dowson’s buildings forthe college.

Opening an Architectural Review from theHigher Education boom of the mid-1960s,the sheer invention of that generation is evident and remarkable, particularly since so many were attempting to synthesise mod-ernism with older traditions in cities likeOxford. The new buildings at Somervillecould not be said to be radically experimentalin comparison – and they may well lookalmost wilfully traditional next to what maybe built across the street – but they are never-theless quietly radical in their longer-term,and wider-scale ambitions.

The materiality and attention to detail ofthe new buildings will ensure that they agewell, and help the college as a whole growinto a more engaged condition, close to theheart of the university. The careful restate-ment of the qualities of an Oxford street is asensitive and bold enrichment of the ROQmasterplan, forming a strong foundation forthe rest of the site to develop in a responsiveway. Both the college and university havegreatly benefitted from the careful and intel-ligent work of Niall McLaughlin Architects.

Project teamArchitect: Niall McLaughlin Architects;project architects: Bev Dockray, SimonBishop; project manager: PDCM; qs:Gardiner & Theobold; structural engineer:Price & Myers; m&e engineer: Hoare Lea;CDM co-ordinator: HCD Management;planning consultant: TurnberryConsulting; contractor: Laing O�Rourke;client: Oxford University EstatesDirectorate, Somerville College.

Selected suppliers and subcontractors Joinery: Panel Edged Products; steelwork:Gascoyne & Beever; fac�ade cladding,stairs: Explore Manufacturing; brick:Ibstock; glass: Pilkington; bathroom pods:Bathsystem; ground source heat pump:TCS; PV panels: AEE; plasterboard partitions: Knauf; rooflights: Vitral.


Documents

BUILDING Town and gown: Niall McLaughlin at Somerville ... · St John’s College). Typological research from this period evolved an understanding of a Above The oak-clad bay windows