With anachronistic wit

The venerable colleges of Oxford are expanding. New College has recently expanded into new quarters. The architectural language skilfully borrows from the picturesque tradition of the city's architecture.

The visitor to Oxford, wandering its streets, experiences the impact of its university dominating a substantial area of the city centre, from the unifying effect of its limestone and the diverse array of buildings, accrued over centuries as its 38 autonomous colleges developed. It is the unexpected surprises created by the juxtapositions of buildings of different architectural forms and styles, and the framing of episodic views which Nikolaus Pevsner described in a series of walks in ‘Visual Planning and the Picturesque’¹ which David Kohn discovered whilst working on his studio’s proposal for New College. It resonated with Kohn’s interest in the pleasures and entertainment to be found in unpredictable proximities experienced in the heterogenous ‘cacophonous’ city. Alongside the University’s monumental presence, Oxford has its share of physical ugliness and banality which when adjacent to university architecture might be identified with the British humour of the absurd. The experience could also be associated with the cityscapes Sebastiano Serlio imagined as theatrical backdrops² which Kohn has also referenced. Of Serlio’s three scenarios, the comic scene represented the general city, activated by its ordinary people, full of asymmetries, with ‘a chaotic assemblage of buildings populated by characters subject to the whim of chance’.³ Such urban experiences are central to Kohn's understanding of design: ‘Some situations would make you want to laugh out loud, not in disdain, but in solidarity with the breath-taking unexpectedness and originality of situations which are nonetheless, in their circumstances, completely ordinary.’⁴

Quadrangles enclosed by buildings

What is largely invisible from the streets, is Oxford University’s consistent morphology of quadrangles. They have developed since the late 14th century as its self governing colleges adopted the format. New College which was originally built into and has retained the north east section of Oxford’s old city walls, was the first to construct a planned quadrangle surrounded by its buildings: hall, chapel, library, gate tower and living accommodation, in a continuous mass. It was also the first to construct a three sided quadrangle opened towards its garden, developed in the late 17th century. As colleges expanded they added more quadrangles linking them via archways through blocks. Their layouts and formal configuration supported the colleges’ hierarchical structures, in contrast with the unpredictable experience of the heterogeneous city outside the college walls.

Both autonomous and contextual architecture

New College has recently developed its land in a semi-suburban area, a short walk north from its original site, in order to house more of its students. The Gradel Quadrangles by David Kohn Architects is a striking group of building forms: a single storey gatehouse with an exaggerated classical entrance archway, a curving trefoil tower with mixed form windows including hexagonals reminiscent of Melnikov’s house in Moscow, and a melifluous three storey open sided quadrangle block; all three faced in variants of cream limestone and pink sandstone. The architecture is enjoyably hard to define, simultaneously distinct from its surroundings and contextual. In fitting a large quantity of student housing and other functions on the site, it has disrupted the quadrangle typology to make an ensemble which is both collegiate and porous to the city. There are Italian baroque church compositions which do something like this, being autonomous and contextual.

The College sought a quadrangle building but the site presented complex challenges, which Kohn has used to make a formally rich architecture, altering the typology in the process. As part of a nineteenth century suburb of large detached Victorian villas and gardens, its open character and its mature trees were required to be preserved, and two existing Arts and Crafts houses were to be retained. Kohn has described the project’s planning to accommodate the brief as ‘contortionism’. The site plan starts from the landscape in which the ground is treated as a flowing plane. The courtyards are parts of a playfully meandering garden where ovoid paving flows through building archways. Such informality suggests a more relaxed college community. The three sided quadrangle building curved and moulded upto its existing neighbours, contains 94 student rooms and shared kitchens, with a communal study room and a performance hall. Its west arm is split down the middle providing classrooms, and an assembly hall and dining room for the adjacent New College School. The tower building has student rooms in its base, and offices for the Gradel Institute of Charity above.

Constantly changing spatial experience

From the gatehouse, with its round arch and entrance set at an angle, the new buildings are composed scenographically with the existing buildings and the landscape. The irregular curves create differences from each viewpoint, resulting in a constantly changing episodic experience of the buildings and grounds. Kohn cites Denise Scott-Brown’s idea of ‘landscape’s inherent capacity to sustain heterogeneity’, foregrounding the accidental⁵. The ambiguity makes the courtyards different from New College’s rigid sequence of quadrangles. The curved student housing block with a horseshoe shaped courtyard references New College’s three sided Garden Quad whilst deriving informality from its surroundings. Its irregularly inflected arms form courtyards on either side with the existing New College School on its west and the arts and crafts Savile House on its east. This unites them into an ensemble along the north boundary, with access to the remains of Civil War ramparts.

The unique curving roof which houses student rooms with sleeping mezzanines, and school classrooms, is constructed from a glue laminated timber structure and clad in polygonal anodised aluminium tiles. It playfully swoops to form curved gabled facades, a contextual response to the neighbouring houses’ steep roofs. The overall effect is a kind of modern baroque, which also appears in the plan in the form and siting of spiral staircases, and the network of foyer and circulation spaces around the music hall in the basement. It is refreshing to see a UK project where instead of the architecture arising from the expressive construction of the façade, it is derived from organic building forms which permeate the interior layouts.

The buildings are also developed scenographically in their layered composition and detail. The gatehouse’s implied classicism, pink stone and large circular grille, reference architectural details in works by Edwin Lutyens and James Stirling, who could both also be free in their assemblages. The polychromatic quad and tower façades connect with William Butterfield’s radical banded brick façades at nearby Keble College. Decorative complexity arises from the curving facades, overlain with references to earlier construction, and some artfully exaggerated details. The geometry of the romboid limestone slabs smoothly follows the buildings’ curved facades. Contrasting pink sandstone plinths, and exaggerated sawtooth eaves bandings, playfully highlight the curving roofs. On the tower’s façades, flush sandstone verticals ironically become flat buttressing, referencing New College’s early buildings.

Borrowings from medieval stonemasonry traditions

The Gradel Quadrangles are rewardingly strange and familiar, enlivened by a playful historicism previously apparent in Kohn’s Design District buildings where the bold use of colour and pattern evoke decorated palazzi or guildhouses. On top of the claddings, a series of carved stone grotesques and gargoyles stand out along the parapets of the new buildings as the only projecting decoration. Their equivalents on New College’s original buildings were mythic or symbolic creatures. Working with the artist Monster Chetwynd, Kohn has adapted New College’s medieval stone carving tradition with anachronistic wit, to a contemporary message about endangered species, including the pangolin and the golden mole. These are details which encourage everyone viewing the buildings to engage, using humour as a provocation to expose New College’s rules and current realities, contextualising the architecture in an unconventional way.