Niall McLaughlin Architects has designed eight low-rise blocks of student rooms and a sports pavilion for Balliol College, Oxford. Amin Taha pays a visit.
Arrive in Oxford by train and you’ll be greeted by Dixon Jones’ Saïd Business School, replete with copper-spire- cum-spiraling ziggurat, and where recently I was part of a team presenting ideas for its new Begbroke campus. The university has looked at Cambridge and east coast universities in the US, all pulling away the world’s best postgraduate researchers, Nobel prize winners and wealth-creating start-ups. Too few of these, when looking to locate, are interested in Oxford’s defensive monastic walls. But they are in a mixture of tech- campus and a critical urban mass offering intellectual and personal crossflow and happenstance. We got to the last three for the £1.5bn masterplan and lost to a scheme featuring drone taxis, which is of course entirely a loser’s mischaracterisation.
Moving on, and into town, you pass post-war Nuffield College, illustrating Oxford’s longer-established conundrum of expansion and identity, now faced by Niall Mclaughlin Architects’ (NMA) recent addition to the city, which is located adjacent to various manifestations of 800-year-old traditions and expectations of city, university and benefactors.
Buttresses and variegated buff-coloured brickwork evoke the gothic vocabulary of nearby colleges. The buttresses reduce down to half a brick at their ends, becoming both visually slender and alluringly tactile.
Nuffield’s architect, Austen Harrison, originally designed stark dominating stone walls, reminiscent of Lutyens’ Castle Drogo, but, at the request/demand of the college’s funder, Lord Nuffield, who viewed the designs as ‘not British enough’, produced a revised proposal in a ‘domestic Cotswold’. Unloved at the time, its fiction, for the purposes of visitors and applying undergraduates, is that the building ‘fits in’.
Walk on and you’ll soon be surrounded by a homogeneity of Corallian limestone-cut and tectonically arranged walls, which, over the past 800 years, have been dressed in gothic, neo-classical and gothic revival. From Jesus College, Turl Street, through Brasenose Lane, arriving at Radcliffe Camera, All Souls, the Bodleian Library and Divinity School; crenellations, battlements, finials and fleches perform next to no physical purpose. Functioning as cultural signifiers of their time, they are a reflection of the expansion and competition between colleges, as they became grander and more established over time. They are arguably, in Gottfried Semper’s definition, Oxford’s ‘completion’.
The project masterplan is intended to mediate a shift in scale and typology at the edge of Oxford’s civic core, from domestic terraced villas towards institutional buildings.
Meandering to the spot where the architects have asked to meet, I pass the shopfront of a stationers.In prime position is a laddered rack of whittled sticks. Harry Potter magic wands?! Are they stamped out of a wood-look plastic mould machine or individually carved? By whom and who buys them? Seeing another confused middle-aged mug through the glass, the shopkeeper kindly explains that they’re mostly for students not tourists. “After all, they are already in Hogwarts, and with gowns. So, wondering around casting spells is easy.” He guesses that I don’t know sports pitches are set up for ‘quidditch’, with students throwing balls through hoops while keeping broomsticks firmly between their legs. He guesses correctly. We discuss splinters and broken thigh bones, but more relevant for now is the appropriation of college structures born of – and dedicated to – Christian study as the backdrop to modern-day Potterism.
I spot Leslie Martin’s St. Cross Building opposite, which must mean that Foster & Partners’ 1990s library is behind it and Arne Jacobsen’s St. Catherine’s College a little further on. Time to take in another sort of fiction; a postwar generation with a willful regard for a better world. ‘Modern’ but late, given that Federico de Onis was already teaching ‘postmodernity’ to Dali, Buñuel and Lorca at Madrid’s Residencia University (modelled on an Oxford college) around 1919, encouraging
them not to discriminate but to source high, low and sideways cultures, including all ethnicities, genders and sexualities. Let them orbit the mind and fall as prose. Consciously or not, it’s a sorcery all architects reason with and without rhyme. A tall, suited silhouette stands some distance ahead. It’s Niall McLaughlin in place of project architects Holly Galbraith, Caoilinn McConville, Joanna Karatzas and Adelina Fasan.
The low-rise buildings frame a series of quadrangles, paths and planted borders. Generous windows are recessed within deep façade reveals to maintain privacy in the bedrooms.
We begin to peruse a set of A3 drawings that mark out physical and historical contexts, principally the old farm buildings that once made up the adjacent junction at St Cross and Manor Road, now a hard line of fast traffic separating Martin, Foster and Jacobsen. Just as Dixon Jones undertook to impose a degree of order on the post-industrial sprawl in front of the railway station, NMA has drawn up future proposals to create a more pedestrian-friendly public realm. To the same purpose, dormitory pavilions, which at first appear loosely scattered or slipping unrooted across the immaculate flat cricket pitch, in fact take their alignment from Martin’s St.Cross faculty and define a clear street boundary line establishing a new urban edge and reinforcing future plans to visually, if not physically, connect the two sides of the road. That ambition, and a successful campaign to get Balliol’s bursars and masters behind a project that has to navigate not-quite-joined-up traffic engineering budgets, reflects the practice’s undimmed passion for architecture fixed in the street experience.
We turn to face the dormitory walls of Master’s Field, with enticing medieval buttresses splaying out at 45 degrees on all corners. While not new to NMA, this device is employed elsewhere to feather out deep walls and direct view lines. Here, the combination of buttresses and variegated buff-coloured bricks is used to introduce the gothic vocabulary of nearby colleges. Mclaughlin gestures up Jowett Walk with deserved pride, pointing out that the façade gives the street a rhythm of light and deep shadow before meeting the blank walls of MacCormac Jamieson Prichard’s 1980s Balliol work. It’s a satisfying visual variegation that Create Streets would have you believe only ‘traditional’ architecture can provide, and immediately speaks of NMA’s abilities to weave a contemporary spell from established ingredients.
The brick piers/buttresses reduce down to half a brick at their ends, becoming both visually slender and alluringly tactile, inviting touch. In fact I’m tempted grip them and violently push and pull to test their robustness. McLaughlin gives me the sort of quizzical glance a disapproving teacher might give you on a field trip; I loosen my grip and follow their line upward. They rise in section and elevation and, not to overplay the gothic allusion, turn to frame each dormitory, possibly referencing Jacobsen’s similar but ‘modern’ metal dormitory framing, and its later concrete finned iteration by Stephen Hodder on the other side of Manor Road. Within NMA’s framing are permutations of glazing, brick and terracotta screening, reflecting the different functions of the spaces behind.
Ground level common rooms are fully glazed to allow approaching students to make an informed decision whether to enter or avoid, before ascending to a mixture of upper-level private and shared rooms. Bricks are stack bonded so they and the terracotta screens read as non-loadbearing. That, with their Hellenistic weave pattern, brings us onto Semper and Bötticher’s tectonic differentiation of ‘kern und kunstform’; the loadbearing structure across the development being entirely cross laminated timber (CLT), treated with a limewash-type finish to lighten its otherwise blonde spruce. McLaughlin explains that the screens had been intended as perforated vents operable within rooms, but the dreaded ‘value engineering’ left them as planning-approved façade details. A gate slowly opens, and we follow the path to more fob plates, hallways, fob plates and into the first common room. With students busy with exams, we sit in the empty common room, able to look to both street and gardens, and chew over the moments where the contractor’s delivery of material and details departed from the original design intent. White plastic conduits had to be applied after both QS and contractor realised too late that NMA’s original coordination had purpose after all. They are peripheral; even Oxford’s best wax and wane with such accretions. The design is strong enough to take them – and whatever else is thrown at it in the coming 200 or so years. It is, as Jeremy Till describes in ‘Architecture Depends’, not contingent on an unachievable vision of perfection.
Living/dining area of the Eastman Flat overlooking Deer Park. The room is lined in ash-veneered plywood and serves as home to the Eastman Visiting Professor, an annual posting for American scholars.
It should be straight up to the dorms, but the security fob labyrinth sends us out to the front gate again before circling round; first to search for bags left in air locks of security thresholds then finally up to the dorms. I have the same experience every day where I teach. According to students, the fob maze isn’t there to stop outsiders coming in but to limit potential theft by other students. Perhaps, like that craze for pigeon spikes, these’ll get stripped out and we’ll all be able to walk once again without fob fear. And come to think of it, there are definitely no fobs at Hogwarts.
Internal stairs and flooring show the signs of input from a bursar well accustomed to end-of-term deep cleaning: plans for timber soffits and details have been replaced by easy-care plasterboard. Fortunately, nothing has diminished the plan and section, and the social mission encapsulated in the overall design. At each landing pass, four rooms cluster around a centrally- located table, giving students the option to linger at this social space. Choice, and an invitation to join or to pass by smaller house groups, is a way of avoiding the pressure young students can feel in larger social groups and, by the same count, the isolation they can experience when unsure how to join them. It’s a mental health issue that Balliol consciously integrated within its brief and NMA has managed convincingly.
A centrally-located sports pavilion overlooks the cricket pitch and includes squash courts, changing rooms and a multi-purpose hall. The timber-framed building adopts a multi-layered structural expression with deep overhanging cantilevered beams and posts topped with a secondary support system, followed by a robust grating acting as a brise soleil.
It’s tempting to linger in the heart of one of these clusters but the presence of exam-stressed students – studiously avoiding eye contact – sends us out and into the cricket pavilion. I would like to think that, once exams are over, the pavilion will act as the project’s social heart. This is where McLaughlin’s painterly hand is perhaps most in evidence. Deep overhanging, thrusting cantilevered beams and posts are topped with a secondary supporting structure, and topped again with a robust yet gossamer-tight grating acting as a brise soleil. This light, unashamedly continental, ‘modern’ layered structural expression achieves a sort of metallic sharpness, reminiscent of work produced in the mid to late 1980s by Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel and Dominique Perrault, but which in less able hands would translate as clunky in the transition from drawing to detail.
We enter through a generous wind lobby and hallway lined with cricket boot racks and team paraphernalia. McLaughlin turns on a set of finger-scaled lights that illuminate an extraordinary timber ceiling. Tiered reciprocal beamed vaults can be found across the world, as a means of achieving large spans from components that are too short to do the job alone. McLaughlin informs me that the inspiration here was the Chinese system that became a sort of combination of a national hierarchy of official buildings construction regulations.
Last time I was invited to a cricket event (at the Oval) I fell asleep and dribbled down my shirt. This is the cure. You can sit back and enjoy being mesmerised by the overall complex composition above your head, like the mass of branches and leaves of the nearby huge oak. Or search for joint details, where one timber piece starts and ends. Under the canopy facing the pitch I realise it accommodates cricket, tennis at the far end, and room to the side for football, rugby, quidditch?
Niall wakes me from my reverie and invites me to follow him downstairs. A cricket pavilion with a basement? As we tour the subterranean Bond world of squash courts and district heating systems, I start to understand how the budget was spread – and how hard Balliol and other colleges must work to continue attracting the world’s best students and postgraduates. At a time when these institutional brands need to speak to an international audience, McLaughlin and his team have responded to Federico De Onis’ 100-year-old call to draw on a broad spectrum of cultures to magical effect.
Site plan
Additional Images
Credits
Project team
Client
Balliol College, Oxford
Architect
Niall McLaughlin Architects
Contractor
BAM Construction
Project manager
Bidwells
Mechanical and electrical engineer
Harley Haddow
Structural, civil and infrastructure engineer
Smith and Wallwork Engineers
Quantity surveyor
Gleeds
Planning consultant
Turnberry Planning
Landscape designer
Bidwells Urban Design Studio
Selected subcontractors
and suppliers
CLT and glulam frame
B&K Structures
Brick-faced precast elements
Thorp Precast
Hand-laid brickwork
Leighway Brickwork
PPC windows
Schüco via Alucraft Systems
Electrical subcontractor
Lowe & Oliver
Pavilion timber frame fabrication
Inwood Developments
Pavilion timber frame installation
Xylotek
External works and groundworks
Goldmax
Internal fitted furniture
Benchmark Joinery
