Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron has completed its much-anticipated new campus for the Royal College of Art in Battersea, south west London.

Photos
Iwan Baan

 

Herzog & de Meuron’s project for the Royal College of Art comprises two new buildings – The Rausing Research and Innovation Building, and The Studio Building – together totalling 15,500 square metres.

The first building spans eight floors, clad in recycled variegated aluminium fins that serve as shading devices, and will primarily be used primarily as a space to undertake research. Here, the ‘Intelligent Mobility Design Centre’ will be housed along with an entrepreneurial incubator, VR and AR visualisation labs, and material and computer science research centres. On the top floor is a seminar and conference space that boasts impressive vistas over west London.

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The Royal College of Art’s new £135m design and innovation campus, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, located in Battersea, London. It is the most significant campus development in the RCA’s 185-year history. 

The latter block is, as its name suggests, a studio, spanning four floors and providing 2,000 square metres of workspace, kitted out with flexible servicing that allows the studios to be adapted to suit the needs of postgraduate sculpture, contemporary art, film and design students. The studio is the most distinguished public-facing part of the new campus —directing itself onto Battersea Bridge Road and Howie Street, and topped with a saw-tooth roof that mimics the Haworth Tompkins-designed Woo Building that arrived in 2015.

At ground level, public paths (yet to open) through delineate each studio within — some being for robotics and others being maker or assembly spaces. The idea, said RCA vice chancellor Dr Paul Thompson, is to foster a “porous” relationship with the public so that locals and passers-by can better understand the activities taking place within.

Brick-clad balconies trace the perimeter of the upper three levels, overlapping at varied increments to create, as Herzog & de Meuron project director John O’Mara describes, a “dynamic dialogue with the street”.

Speaking during a press tour of the building, Jacques Herzog explained how the £135 million addition to the school’s Battersea campus differed from the studio’s previous cultural buildings in London – namely the Tate Modern Switch House and Trinity Laban Centre, where he said playful elements had been embedded. “Here, there is a more a flavour of tradition and even maybe modesty,” he said. “And at the same [this project] has a need, an ambition to be open for collaboration, to share space, and be open to the street.”

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The project’s nexus manifests in what is known as ‘the Hangar’ — a double-height, 350 square metre area found at the ground level of the studio block, which opens up through two floor-to-ceiling bi-fold doors at the north and south sides of the building. The north door opening onto Howie Street serves as the main entrance point for visitors and as a viewing gallery of sorts, as well as allowing large-scale works to be brought in. Herzog explained the intention for this space also to also be used as a temporary exhibition area and for crits.

The mezzanine level above, meanwhile, is a more formal exhibition space. Currently on show is the Archive Exhibition, which fittingly shows works related to the construction of the two new buildings.

“It is so important to tell people around in the neighbourhood who you are, what you do and to let them in. And the same thing should be happening inside the building. This horizontal exchange is so important,” said Herzog.

“Our experience with designing many museums in the last 20 years tells me that art institutions increasingly tend to blur the traditional boundaries between the collection, presentation, preservation, and even the production of art. In addition, such institutions want to be great social spaces and focal points for public life,” he continued.

“Our design for the new RCA and its programming at Battersea traces a path not so dissimilar to this new ideal. Students, teachers, and visitors will find themselves in a kind of village built around the topic of art, with an architectural atmosphere that encourages the entire community to engage in a constant process of teaching and learning, producing, presenting, and discussing art.”

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The large-scale Hangar in the Royal College of Art’s new £135m design and innovation campus, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, located in Battersea, London. This double height space has vast doors at each end to enable the installation of heavy, large, or complex works of art, and will be accessible to the wider public.

Herzog & de Meuron won the commission for the project in 2016, staving off competition from French studio Lacaton Vassal, Chicago-based Studio Gang, London-based Serie Architects, Christian Kerez from Switzerland and Robbrecht en Daem from Belgium. the project gained planning two years later, after being awarded £54 million in grant funding from the treasury in 2016 and a £15 million gift from the Sigrid Rausing Trust (among other donors).

Though now open, work is still to be done: the café on the south side of the building, alongside new courtyards to complete the public realm, are yet to complete.

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