Keith Williams charts a programme of bold, creative commissioning that has transformed the London School of Economics’ cramped, fragmented estate into a world-class campus.
The LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science) is one of the world’s foremost academic institutions. While 2020-2021 marked its 125th anniversary, it is the past 15 years that have witnessed the most significant architectural commissioning programme in its long history.
The LSE first opened its doors in 1895 operating from three rooms in 9 JohnAdam Street, near its current site. Founded by four members of the FabianSociety, Sidney Webb, his wife, the social investigator Beatrice Webb, the political scientist Graham Wallas, and GeorgeBernard Shaw, the School was open to women and men and welcomed students from overseas.
The 1895 Prospectus stated ‘The special aim of the School will be, from the first, the study and investigation of the concrete facts of industrial life and the actual working of economic and political relations as they exist or have existed, in the UnitedKingdom and in foreign countries.’
The LSE joined the University of London in 1902 and the same year moved to Clare Market, City of Westminster, to occupy the newly built Passmore Edwards Hall.The architect, Maurice B Adams, then editor of Building News, was selected through competition, a tradition later revived in the 21st century, and though the building survived less than 20 years, it nevertheless established the LSE in the place where it remains to the present day.
The LSE grew to become a world-famous institution, generating an illustrious roll call of famous names that once studied or held posts there. These include several Nobel laureates, world leaders, politicians, senior bankers, and economists, as well as historians, authors and those in the arts and philosophy. Names plucked at random include Hilary Mantel, David Attenborough, William Beveridge, Jomo Kenyatta, George Soros, Pierre Trudeau, Michael Manley, Romano Prodi, David Rockefeller, Janet Yellen, Mervyn King, Karl Popper, NaomiKlein, and a certain Mick Jagger who dropped out to join a rock and roll band; a move that seems to have worked out reasonably well.
Academically, the school competes with Oxford, Harvard, Yale and Cambridge for students and staff. But historically, its architecture never came close to matching its illustrious list of alumni or its standing on the international stage.
The Aldwych Campus
The LSE’s campus is located just off Kingsway, a grand 450-metre-long boulevard opened in 1905. Linking High Holborn to the Strand, it is one of the major north–south routes through central London.The Aldwych, a curved urban block, the shape of an orange segment on plan, terminates Kingsway’s southern end with the extraordinarily grand stage set architecture of Bush House by HarveyWiley Corbett built between 1925 and 1935. The Aldwych and Kingsway form one of London’s major heroic set piece ensembles.
Visualisation of proposal for The Firoz Lalji Global Hub by David Chipperfield and Feix&Merlin, likely to be the university’s last major new-build commission. The building will house conference facilities, teaching spaces, digital labs and a 350-seat theatre
Snuggled away almost invisibly, and seemingly oblivious to its grand urban neighbour, in the section where the eastern side of Kingsway meets the Aldwych and to the south of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, sits the LSE. It occupied a fragmented series of plots assembled largely through organic acquisition, as neighbouring properties were randomly absorbed and recolonised for academic use. The result was a choked estate; a disparate, disconnected range of buildings hugging a series of historic narrow lanes and streets. Discernible urban presence and architectural identity were in short supply. Crucially, it was denied the quad or court that in the idealised university environment would form the cohesive armature around which academic buildings jostle. Post-war introductions, such as the undistinguished saw-tooth buildings of 1971 edging Clements Inn Passage, provided valuable floor plate but did little to ease the sense of claustrophobia.
The first hint of a new beginning centred on the elegant café pavilion by MacCormac Jamieson Prichard (2003) and the rather small John Watkins Plaza fronting the LSE’s British Library of Political & Economic Science. 2005 saw a step-change in the LSE’s approach. Determined to commission a series of world-class buildings to match the LSE’s academic reputation, Julian Robinson, incoming Director of Estates and Ken Kinsella, Director of Capital Development, with guiding architectural insight from Ricky Burdett, the LSE’s Professor of Urban Studies, set about reinvigorating the estate, in the process creating a dynamic academic quarter centred on a cohesive public realm, whilst also giving the LSE architectural presence and impact.
Nicholas Grimshaw’s office was appointed to convert the New Academic Building in the extreme south-west corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Elegantly done, the massive Edwardian stone building was hollowed out and somehow made light and airy. With little outward manifestation save for slick metal ‘blinkers’ inserted into the stone window openings in the rusticated base of the muscular Portland Stone façade, Grimshaw’s work was a subtle indication that contemporary architecture of a high order had started to arrive at the LSE. Opening in 2008, the conversion also delivered a new connectivity, linking Kingsway to Lincoln’s Inn Fields through the building’s main concourse. The LSE also commissioned Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios to produce a loose-fit masterplan that focused on a strategic urban morphology and the provision of public realm within the emerging new academic quarter, which would frame the bolder architectural interventions to come.
The Saw Swee Hock Student Centre
In 2014, the LSE opened its first wholly new building for 40 years, The Saw Swee Hock Student Centre, a commission won by O’Donnell & Tuomey in international competition.
Nicholas Grimshaw’s 2008 reworking of the New Academic Building at Lincoln’s Inn Fields hollowed out an Edwardian building to create a light-filled triple-height atrium. Grimshaw’s reworking is barely discernible from the exterior, but was the first hint of the wave of ambitious commissioning to come
The building jackknifes into the L-shaped recess formed by adjacent buildings on Kingsway and Sardinia Street, and is split apart by a V-shaped rent in its form that creates space for its entrance and a canted atrium which brings light deep into the plan. Comprising six floors aboveground and two levels of deep basement beneath for lecture and other spaces, the 6,000-square-metre building is largely occupied by the Student Union and related student services. Dominating the then newly pedestrianised Sheffield Street, it pulls in its skirts to create a mini-forecourt and much-needed public realm. It forms a powerful emblematic accent in the streetscape, a bravura punctuation mark; an architecture of frenzied origami in brickwork. Shortlisted for the Stirling Prize in 2014, this is bold, exciting, seemingly a-programmatic, expressionistic architecture given full vent and the first project to define a new era of bold creative commissioning by the LSE.
The Centre Building
Next up, the 17,500-square-metre Centre Building by RSHP is an example of a competition entry that challenged the brief and won. Led by Tracy Meller at RSHP with input from Richard Rogers himself, the architects proposed building more storeys than the brief envisaged to free ground-level space to expand John Watkins Plaza – a smart move that gave the campus a key orientation area and public square at its heart. This is a deceptively simple building of great clarity with two distinct volumes, one of six storeys and one of 13 storeys. Subterranean lecture spaces push under the newly created public square. The ground level is a vast, near double-height student common room running much of the length of Houghton Street; a forum for interaction, challenge and debate. Meller speaks of the building helping to create a ‘sticky campus’ with students remaining on site for extended periods rather than just arriving for lectures and then evaporating back into the city. A huge top-lit processional stair punches through the plan from basement upwards, culminating in a third-floor student courtyard, whilst bringing light deep into the building’s heart. Further terraces at the higher levels give stupendous views across the city. This subtly tapered circulation system forms the joint between the two building volumes. The spaces in the 13-storey wing above the third storey are known as the academic levels and are occupied exclusively by staff.
A zig-zag of open stairways meanders rather restfully through this hushed world of professorial study, breaking through the floor-by-floor segregation of academe to encourage cross-departmental interaction and debate. No silos here. This is a move reminiscent of the additive external circulation system at the Pompidou, but here in inverse recessive form, its only manifestation externally signalled by large unbroken glazed panels that dance across the external façade.
At the Centre Building, the ground floor space known as the ‘teaching and learning commons’ encourages students from different disciplines to to work together and socialise. The colour palette and the careful arrangement of lighting, air handling ducts and acoustic baffles recall RSHP’s early work.
Despite the extensive glazing, the building has achieved BREEAM Outstanding, in part thanks to the careful positioning of solar shielding fins and the balance between glazing and densely insulated solid façades.
On Houghton Street, the materiality shifts from glass and aluminium to a base of modularised stone, to bed the building contextually with the stone façades opposite. The façade treatment is certainly animated, some may say overtly busy, but the rich variety of fins and sophisticated deployment of colour provide a welcome accent and distinct focus to this key building and expanded public square.
Opened in 2019, it is a bold, exciting building that effortlessly commands its centre stage position. Major art commissions include World Turned Upside Down by 2007 Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger. Arts programmes are so often badly done, but this one succeeds by carefully weaving well-chosen works by seriously good artists into the revitalised public realm.
The Marshall Building
In 2015 Grafton Architects won the commission for the Marshall Building, arguably the LSE’s most ambitious project. The key location, at the south-west edge of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, is opposite the Soane Museum and occupies the site of the former Cancer Research UK building.
It backs onto Portsmouth Street, the route through to the LSE’s centre from Lincoln’s Inn Fields; a position that allows for connections to John Watkins Plaza, The Centre Building and the Saw Swee Hock Student Centre and for The Marshall Building to act as a new gateway to the LSE campus as a whole.
Built in a mixture of limestone and precast panels but with consistent tonality, the main frontage has strong formal qualities yet offers glimpses of a more informal world of gathering and exchange within. A huge basement surmounted by nine further storeys contributes 17,000 square-metres of floor space to the campus. Transparent ground levels showcase the ‘Grand Hall’a double-height concourse that, with its mega-scale concrete structural trees, animates the street scene before opening to a great slot that cuts a vertical slice through the building.
The space, though tall, feels rather weighty. The architect has eschewed the temptation to produce yet another light-filled atrium, instead successfully referencing the compressive space of the nearby 17th Lincoln’s Inn Chapel with its tight vaulted undercroft. This is a subtler game. The façades of the Grand Hall’s upper levels are relatively solid up to the height of the neighbouring buildings, breaking into two banks of double-height columnar upper storeys of differing cadence. It is very well composed. It is tempting to compare the Marshall Building to the much-lauded Town House at Kingston University by the same architects. Whilst possessing certain motifs and aspects of materiality in common, their contexts are vastly different and the formal roles that the two buildings undertake in response causes their design to pursue significantly different expressions.
Completed in 2021, The Marshall Building by Grafton Architects has a gravitas that gives it a sense of permanence and belonging and has given the LSE its first major, wholly new architectural presence at Lincoln’s Inn Fields
The Marshall Building, aesthetically far denser than the Town House seems to have a gravitas that gives it a sense of permanence and belonging, appearing already to feel like a comfortable fit into its environs, despite its significant scale. The building transitions very skilfully between the historic buildings and green open space of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the tighter grain within the LSE campus itself. Completed in autumn 2021, the Marshall Building has given the LSE its first major, wholly new architectural presence on Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
The Firoz Lalji Global Hub
Following an international competition, David Chipperfield Architects and Feix&Merlin Architects have been selected to design the latest and probably the last major new-build commission the LSE will award, the Firoz Lalji Global Hub at 35 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Housing conference facilities, teaching spaces, digital labs and a 350-seat theatre, the design embraces a strategy of adaptive re-use, retaining large parts of the existing building. Despite the somewhat ad hoc nature of its estate’s evolution, over the past two decades the LSE has developed into that very rare thing: an important patron of architecture repeatedly commissioning headline grabbing projects by fine architects.
These exceptional buildings have at last given the LSE the architectural identity and presence that it so badly needed, and along with its vital new public spaces, are in the process of successfully transforming this choked city quarter estate into a vibrant, permeable, academic campus of a very high order.
