Simon Sainsbury Centre

Stanton Williams’ quiet extension to the Cambridge Judge Business School is enriched by care and the craft of building, finds Alan Berman

Words
Alan Berman
Photos
Hufton & Crow

In this bright, over-lit world where vain benefactors commission loud eye-candy buildings with little regard for their social and urban contexts, it’s heartening to find Stanton Williams’ Simon Sainsbury Centre – an extension to the University of Cambridge Judge Business School – so beautifully restrained and appropriate to its context. Entered through the school’s original base, in Matthew Digby Wyatt’s elaborate 1866 Addenbrooke’s Hospital building, and then through John Outram’s brashly colourful Egyptian-style 1995 extension, the new addition has its public face at the rear of the site, and despite its size sits comfortably on this small street in a conservation area. The new addition’s modulated scale and carefully crafted brick and precast elements have a richness equal to the older buildings around it – so much more impressive and welcoming than the histrionic superficial forms that many universities seem to consider essential.

The new building provides 5,000 square metres of teaching facilities over four floors for a wide range of students of business management and also executive education, with supporting offices and social facilities. Stanton Williams’ long, thin ‘wing’ fills the last part of the old hospital site, running parallel to but separated from Wyatt’s original by Outram’s shorter addition, making the whole school into an elongated U-shape.

At ground floor the open centre is covered to create a reception foyer, whose heavy concrete roof forms a courtyard at first floor. Part of the new wing looks south across this court to the brick back of Wyatt’s building, and north over Downing College, so that the interior is flooded with light from both sides.

A circulation spine on the ground and first floors runs the full length of the inner (south) side connecting to the earlier wings, off which – to the north – the social and teaching spaces are arranged. The length is divided into two zones which can operate independently so that university students do not overlap with executive students. Internally the requirement for two distinct areas is subtly handled, with no strong sense of division, and there is flexibility so that spaces can be linked.

Externally the two-part use informs the composition of the long facade: a street-level base runs the full length, above which, flush with the base, two distinct vertically-proportioned volumes rise to the third floor. Each accommodates a different user group, separated by a recess which creates a first-floor terrace overlooking Downing College.

This composition masterfully achieves something unusual: a large building directly on the pavement line which manages to retain the small scale of the street. The fourth floor is set back and reduces the apparent height of the building from the street, but the precast elements used here seem insufficiently robust: when seen from the gable ends this fourth storey is not quite convincing either as a strong termination or as a light, ‘floating’ element.

Wyatt’s 15-foot structural grid orders the interior and exterior. On the facades, precast concrete blades, similar in tone to the brickwork and set flush with it, run between the structural piers in front of wide window openings, creating a rhythm similar to Wyatt’s colonnaded facade. These substantial blades shield the glass from low east and west sun, their sides highly polished in contrast with their rougher front faces in order to bounce light inwards. But these robust vertical elements – reminiscent of earlier works by the architect – do much more. At a time when so much architecture tends to be paper thin and superficial, Stanton Williams creates unambiguously solid masonry volumes which manage also to be full of natural light.

The Simon Sainsbury Centre is entered at two points: one route carved through Outram’s extension leads to the student areas while a diagonal route leads at the ground floor to the brightly-lit executive foyer. The high ceilings of the original hospital, which Outram also adopted, are carried through on the first two levels of the new addition so that all circulation, public and social spaces throughout the complex are on the same levels, while upper floor heights are reduced over the smaller spaces. This produces an enjoyable variety of internal volumes, most dramatically where the grand executive stair rises through a triple-height volume.

Executive social areas on the first and second floors overlook this tall volume, and also have views into the courtyard through a two-storey glass wall supported by slender bronze-faced structural fins making a colonnaded screen similar to the street facade. The fronts of the galleried social spaces are framed by the powerful concrete structure which, with the lighter glass wall, creates an enjoyable inside/outside ambiguity.

Natural light and views to the outside are everywhere. Where the new building abuts the existing it doesn’t quite touch: lines of roof glazing in the gap cast light onto the older walls and serve to articulate the buildings of different periods.

Internally a limited palette of materials has been used: bare concrete and timber-veneered panels or vertical battens, with areas of white and occasional red plaster. An exceptional level of control is evident in the detailing, with a Scarpa-like attention to the joints. Everywhere there is thoughtful design that considers the users: the heavy stone balustrade on the terrace contains a section of glass allowing views down an axis of Downing College’s garden; roof glazing is positioned to light Outram’s colourfully glazed wall panels; the building is set back 500mm to enlarge the pavement for the many students who now use this street.

This care extends to the ingenious detailing of services. Trox units within the walls draw in and expel air through slotted metal linings on one jamb of each window, and through slotted panels internally. On the first floor this lining turns horizontally to form a metal sill which, in order to throw off rainwater, projects some 30mm, whereas the second floor needs no sill. This small projection is retained on the vertical lining, casting shadows on the brickwork – a tiny detail which gives modelling to the facade, but reveals a level of thought that is design of an extremely high order.

Enjoyable as the beautifully crafted interior is, it left me with a sense of something missing. It is tellingly similar to Oxford’s Saïd Business School by Dixon Jones: these immaculate, rigorously controlled spaces suggest a slight absence of the human. Everything is super-smooth; nothing is accidental or disrupts the rigorous geometry, and there is only minimal colour.

Such calm, ordered interiors are perhaps expected by ‘executives’ and Stanton Williams delivers it in spades, but there seems little room for doubt or difference. How will it accept posters, notices and similar signs of student occupation? For students hopefully seeking alternative futures, would it not be more appropriate – and make the architecture even finer – if it relaxed a little? While the cool interiors are a relief from Outram’s hot, colourful spaces, it is Outram’s extension that shows the signs of student life.

Such questions are more social than architectural, and querying the brief and the school’s approach to its users hardly detract from this building’s immense value to the city, to the university and to the benefactors. It is also an exemplar to the profession, because we need more architects to learn the art and craft of making buildings of such exceptional quality. This is an approach to architecture articulated by Colin St John Wilson in his important but insufficiently disseminated writings, most particularly ‘The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture’ – the belief that architecture is above all the artful response to human needs, grounded and tectonic so as to outlast passing fashion.