Fletcher Priest’s New Academic Centre neatly reframes St Anne’s College, Oxford

Words
Tim Abrahams
Photos
David Grandorge

The new library at St Anne’s College, Oxford, welcomes a gendered reading. Founded in 1879 as The Society of Home-Students for women who were excluded by gender from studying at the university, St Anne’s is housed in a collection of twentieth-century buildings dispersed across a large garden with easy open access between the Banbury and Woodstock Roads that head north out of the city. St Anne’s has no quad per se. Successive masterplans and major additions have affirmed rather than detracted from this somewhat pastoral vision of the Oxford college. In comparison to St Anne’s, the enclosed, occasionally cloistered courtyards of other colleges seem slightly masculine in a reclusive, donnish sense.

The college’s New Library and Academic Centre by Fletcher Priest is a noteworthy structure in its own right – a simple, keenly proportioned Bath stone-clad structure – but it is also the largest physical manifestation of a subtle, sympathetic masterplan for the college undertaken by the practice.

Fletcher Priest risked the wrath of the Twentieth Century Society”

Fletcher Priest has affirmed the significance of the book in college life, doubling the college’s library provision and restating the significance of Harland House. This building – predominantly a library – was built in three phases over 15 years to a design by Giles Gilbert Scott simultaneously with his New Bodleian Library. In many ways Harland House is – in its delightful intimacy and detail – superior to that better-known building. It also forms the east-west spine of the St Anne’s site.

The campus has grown around this spine in an ad-hoc fashion, with gay abandon and little concern for legibility. Fletcher Priest risked the wrath of the Twentieth Century Society by removing an accommodation block known as the Gatehouse, which Howell Killick Partridge & Amis had stuck on the west facade of Harland House, obliterating it and creating an entrance more legible as student accommodation than an august place of learning. However, the college also has two larger grade II-listed, four-storey halls of residence by the same practice, with 90 cramped study-bedrooms off narrow corridors, which are still very much extant to the east of the library.

In fact, Fletcher Priest’s work has given them a better perspective. For years, a temporary kitchen dominated the lawn in front of them. Its tiny food preparation area was utterly incapable of dealing with the demands of catering for the simple, graceful mid-century dining hall by local architect Gerald Banks, particularly when the student population expanded with the addition of a new block to the north by KPF. To resolve this, Fletcher Priest has also wrapped a state-of-the-art kitchen around the hall on the western side adjacent to the Woodstock Road, cloaking it in a masonry wall. More visibly, the new library has also helped define two more recognisably collegiate spaces on the site, particularly in providing the southerly definition to an entrance quad on the site of the demolished Gatehouse.

There are some moments that jazz things up”

The new library works very well as a means of resolving the ambitions of the college and the logic of the existing arrangement of the campus. But what of the building itself?

It is ruthlessly simple in form: a cuboid extrapolation of the open square that has been created on the site of the demolished Gatehouse. In a fashion the quad has reasserted itself at St Anne’s but in an open, looser form. The college now has a clear entrance and an urban presence on the Woodstock Road.

Fletcher Priest took an unusual philosophical approach to stepping into the deep social and architectural history of building an Oxford college library. Rather than wracking their brains on how to express the contemporary architectural moment, the architects determined that the best way to achieve longevity was through flexibility of use and adaptability of the building.

Structural steel beams – with timber mounted without where exposed – support 200mm-thick precast concrete floor slabs. The generous 4.3 metre floor-to-floor height allows 3.3-metre-high windows in deep recesses that provide some shading. The depth of the envelope also allows it to act as a skeleton through which services run. Every second column is actually a C-section pier drawing air down the building, while four central columns supply air to floor plenums.

There are some moments that jazz things up, such as a supergraphic of St Anne’s heraldic crest etched into Corian around the lift shaft. The emphasis elsewhere is on quality detailing – from the grey wall system to the tables with standard leg systems onto which Fletcher Priest has grafted its own bespoke tops. Variations in the plan, from the ground floor library to seminar spaces on the upper floors, create a sense of variety. Here, the generosity is not so much in the detailing as in the ample amount of space and light provided. The use of honeyed bath stone keeps the new building in tone with Harland House.

That said, the most successful moments are where the potentially rigid cuboid concept unfolds into the existing fabric of the college. The subterranean reading room sits on the northern side of a plant room, constituting over half of the single below-ground floor. It looks out to a submerged patio and is understandably a favourite of the students. Most dramatic of all though is the roof garden atop the northernmost section of the kitchen but accessed from a suite of seminar spaces and public rooms on the first floor. Fitting around the curvaceous kitchen of the Banks dining room and with luxurious planted raised beds on different levels, it also provides singular views of the Radcliffe Observatory to the south west.

If the building lacks the flourishes of its historical predecessors on the site, then it certainly permits a more open and generous understanding of the college’s goals, and the nuances of the architecture convey something of the institution’s history.

The library is an expression of a thoughtful appreciation of what exists and what is needed – not just in a spatial sense, but in an historical one too. Although the building is ever so slightly dull, it enables access to 100,000 books on open shelves both in its own provision and the opening-up of the facility at Harland House. It is a moment of stillness amidst the different historical buildings, and a fulcrum around which the college can pivot towards the future.

Additional Images

Download Drawings

Credits