Queen Mary university of London

Name: Vandersanden
Address: 16 Stocks Bridge Way, Compass Point Business Park, St Ives, Cambridgeshire, PE27 5JL, UK
Telephone: +44 (0)1954268075

The days of university faculties bumbling along in decaying old buildings, caring more about their intellectual milieu than their physical one, are long gone in the UK. Coinciding perhaps with the introduction of increased undergraduate student fees in 2006 and the surge in premium master’s courses, Britain’s universities have been plunging money into new buildings and facilities to attract and welcome students from home and abroad.

This increased concern for the physical has given rise to a host of shiny buildings as well as new university building types that barely existing before: student hubs that centralise administrative departments and forums for students to gather with group study zones. Every corner of the university campus is being scrutinised for renewal. Universities are in competition with each other to keep at the head of the innovation curve.

Another of these new typologies is the ‘graduate centre’, the latest of which has just completed at Queen Mary University in Mile End, east London, for £36m. Designed by Wilkinson Eyre, this one accommodates the central administration for the doctoral college, special study rooms and spaces for postgraduate students as well as a café, Harvard-style lecture theatre and events space. It rolls in the new School of Economics and Finance too.

‘Postgraduate programmes have grown a lot,’ explains the client representative Professor Morag Shiach. 'We also have a large number of PhD students. We wanted to provide them with a separate building with a different feel, meeting the expectations of people who are going onto a more professionalised world – business, economics, finance and law.’

Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios carried out a feasibility study in the 2000s and identified an underused site to the rear of Engineering Building and The People’s Palace, one of the university’s original buildings. While that architect suggested building a tower, when it came to the competition in 2012, Wilkinson Eyre won the bid for proposing to put the same amount of space horizontally, repairing the backs of buildings and creating a new rear face for the city block which had become a thoroughfare and service road.

The resulting building is an 80m-long seven-storey ground-scraper characterised by its two glazed bands of accommodation at the top and bottom for student social and study spaces, sandwiching three floors of more cellular academic offices in between articulated in brick with smaller windows. The enormity of the 7700m2 building has been carefully broken down as five stacked volumes that shift back and forth from the building line with a careful composition.

‘Because the graduate centre is backing up against other buildings, it couldn’t have a deep plan,’ explains architect Stafford Critchlow. ‘It had to work more in one direction. We needed a wider depth for the lecture theatre for the lecture theatre so it flares out at one end, while the boomerang shape follows the contour of these buildings behind but also helps break up the length inside and outside.’

Brick was selected to emphasise the horizontality of the volumes as well as to fit into the context of the neighbouring buildings; the rear of the People’s Palace but also the Octagon.

‘Brick felt right,’ says Critchlow ‘and we had been looking to use a thin, long Roman brick for a long time.’

This particular brick system named Zero from Vandersanden was chosen for the external walls for its contemporary joint-free appearance, which the architect had only seen used in Belgium. Instead of being pointed up to the face of the bricks, the mortar is set well back, with the rainwater draining behind. Although the building is surrounded by brick buildings, the three tones specified for the brick bands do not pick up any of the different coloured bricks around. Rather, the lower level is a pearl grey (named Quartis), mid grey for the middle band (Platina) and yellow for the top (Crème) – the darkest colour in the middle. This combines with the champagne coloured glazing frames to give the project a delicate and soft appearance, despite its size.

Where the three brick volumes oversail another, the architect has designed brick slip soffits, also manufactured by Vandersanden, that make the different layers feel like solid, almost independent, elements. Here, because of the risk of brick slips falling off, Wilkinson Eyre devised a system with contractor Bouygues whereby the slips are bonded together in runs of 10-15 onto tongue and groove planks that are in turn interlinked and fixed up to the steel substructure, forming a kind of factory fitted product. The detail is particularly beautiful where the different planes feather together at the corners or at the bend in the boomerang form.

Overall, Wilkinson Eyre’s Graduate Centre is a reliable architecture that still manages to be playful and reinvent. With all the competition at neighbouring universities it's one you'd be happy to attend.