Grafton Architects’ Kingston University Town House fosters connections between students, the institution and the city, finds Louis Mayes.

Words
Louis Mayes
Photos
Ed Reeve, Dennis Gilbert

Grafton Architects has completed its first UK project – the Town House for Kingston University London – months after the Dublin-based practice received the 2020 Royal Gold Medal. Referred to as a ‘Learning Landscape’, the 9400-square-metre structure hosts dance studios, a library, a theatre and a cafe – uses that have rarely been combined successfully, according to Yvonne Farrell, founding director at Grafton: “It takes bravery to put a sound-emitting dance studio next to a library, but because of the educational collaboration the risk was taken”.

As her co-director Gerard Carty points out, “the library demands quiet, whereas the dance studios are inherently noisy. It was these juxtapositions that we found extremely interesting”. Indeed, it seems that the tension created by this programmatic duality is what lends richness to the scheme.

This radical ethos and ambition of the university is immediately reflected in the massing of the Town House. The facade sits well proud of the existing street line, meaning that the new public landscape meets, and continues through, the main entrance, which is situated on the south side of the building. The east-facing facade, fronting the street, is made up of a layer of loggias and galleries planted with vines, with precast columns stepping out over the pavement. The other facades are more domestic in scale, with glazing broken up by delicate reconstituted stone mullions which recall the nearby Hampton Court Palace.

The loggias lend a certain civic quality. “There was a huge requirement to break down boundaries between the community and the university”, explains Farrell. The facade is framed by columns gritted on three outward-facing sides so that from a distance they resemble the Portland stone-clad council building opposite. The internal face of the columns remains concrete as-cast, an accent suggesting a new condition facing inwards towards the building’s interior, drawing you through the loggias and across into the semi-public space of the university. The public/ private boundary is more conventionally negotiated by a cafe at the northern end of the Town House. It is these soft boundaries between the public and private space that Grafton has crafted. With no barriers, the public can walk straight from the street into the six-storey-high lobby. Grafton has purposefully created a piece of internal public space “partly inside and partly outside”, says Farrell.

The p­rogrammatic variety within the building is reconciled by the foyer, which cuts vertically through six storeys, exposing in section the library, archive, cafes, and dance studios. “We wanted to think about the building as a social organisation in terms of section”, says Farrell. “Volume, section and relationships – these are the things that give the spirit of the structure”.

George Perec once noted that “we need to learn to live more on staircases. But how?”. Grafton’s solution is a two-metre-wide open staircase that spans between floors and rises the full height of the foyer, running parallel to the road outside. Farrell calls this staircase the “social promenade” and “a place of encounter”. Berthold Lubetkin said of a staircase that “the purpose is not just to climb up and down – it is also to enjoy it in some organic way”.

Pausing with Farrell, we watch two pairs of people pass one another, continuing their private conversations. “We positioned the lifts slightly out of the way, and the staircase has become a river of use”, she says. “People are using the volume, and the volumetric connection is really based on an educational idea”. This idea of exposing the array of activities taking place within the building is part of the cross-disciplinary concept that won Grafton the competition, and which it has developed alongside university staff.

‘The Courtyard’ is an unprogrammed benched area at the heart of the building that takes the form of an amphitheatre, facing out to the street across the foyer. It acts as a microcosm of the project: open to all, it carves vertically through three storeys and is overlooked by the library, dance studios, circulation space and a group study area. This confluence of programmes and routes exposes the uses of the building to all users and invites a collaborative and exploratory approach to education.

Punching vertically through floor plates has been repeated to create adaptable public areas. “We thought about how these strata that sit on top of one another could be interconnected”, says Carty, “otherwise you’re in danger of creating horizontal silos”. Quiet library floors are connected with group study areas, blurring the lines between zones and disciplines.

Despite this richly interconnected inner life, this building is not an introvert: Grafton is named after the Dublin street that the practice is based on, and seems to have carried the sense of being tied to a particular locus through into its projects. “One of the cultural possibilities of architecture is that you’re reminded of where you are”, says Farrell. “Sometimes with contemporary architecture you can be completely obliterated from your context”. At the Town House, windows are deliberately positioned to frame elements of the city. The county hall is visible from one, Hampton Court from a second and the Thames from a third.

The spaces are also linked internally by a network of incidental auditory and visual links, encouraging an exploratory attitude. As you move across through the building – which Farrell has described as a “volumetric soundscape” – you are attracted by the sound of voices. And while the theatre is acoustically sealed, it is visually linked to both the courtyard and an evergreen oak tree outside. The vertical circulation is generally open, allowing several ways of arriving at a location. Promoting choice and an independence of movement is part of Farrell’s conception of architecture as ‘social engineering’.

The structure and material palette are pared back, but remain legible; girders commonly used as components in bridges bear onto precast concrete piers and columns, and the floor only has three predominant finishes – polished concrete, timber and tiles. These materials work hard: the ridged ceiling and floor tiles are acoustically attenuating, and the other floor surfaces demarcate different programmatic zones.

Grafton suggests that focus of its design has been to “accommodate general movement within a framework” and so translates the idea of ‘building as infrastructure’ into conceptual terms. “I see the Town House as more of an infrastructure than a building”, suggests Carty, in reference to the wide spans of the girders that lend a certain future adaptability. Though the Town House is predominantly constructed from cement-based materials, there is an argument that its capacity for reorganisation represents an alternative kind of environmental friendliness: if we are to build new, we should ensure that spaces are adaptable, well built, and well used.

Farrell talks about “space in between” being key to the design process of the Town House and indeed the substance of the building itself stands secondary to allowing the occupants to adapt it to their needs. Grafton’s idea of developing the social programme through section, not plan, recognises the potency of interdisciplinary cross-pollination and the need for collaboration and in today’s university buildings.

The Town House has a spirit and generosity of character refined from a clear set of idealistic concepts and emboldened through discussions with the client. The result is a building that is well detailed though not materially ostentatious, but most importantly one that is tuned to the needs of occupants. Architecture here serves as the spatial glue that binds together the various functions in a complimentary manner – structured by in-between spaces and places of connection and encounter – rather than to make a spectacular image for the university. The Town House is, in Farrell’s words, “a facilitator that steps back and allows things to happen that we didn’t even think about”.

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