New London Architecture

Embrace flexible futures, university estates told

Wednesday 30 September 2020

David Taylor

Editor, NLQ and New London Weekly

Universities must put flexibility at the top of their agenda as ‘an imperative for the unknown’, keep ‘knitting’ themselves into the heart of the city and engaging with their neighbouring communities if they are to prosper in the age of Covid-19.

That was according to Allies and Morrison director Vicky Thornton as she gave the opening address in a webinar last week created to debate the prospects of university estates as city makers; their responses to the pandemic and long-term plans. 

‘Flexibility has always been key, but moving forward it feels as if the agility of buildings to expand and contract and change use is going to be fundamental for our future’, she said. 

Thornton was presenting the practice’s work at Imperial College in the ‘ever changing and diverse area of west London’ at White City, at UAL in an ‘educational ecosystem’ at Stratford, east London and Elephant and Castle, and Addenbrookes in Cambridge, where university research and hospital come together in the Cambridge biomedical campus, ‘a mutually symbiotic piece of the city’. Imperial aims to create value beyond the university into the city with a flexible framework an including common spaces for collaboration and community as an organisation ‘networked into the city and beyond’. This was a principle the practice also employed at King’s Cross, with White City featuring flexible perimeter condition buildings, sheltered colonnades and new connections to create an animated route between campuses. Universities should learn from the city and find ways to integrate, create common space for communal life but think of flexibility as an enabler, said Thornton. ‘You have to really believe in the city; it is the place that will endure beyond pandemics. A sustainable future is an inevitable future’.

White City shared garden links campus with neighbours © 
Allies and Morrison
Other panellists at the event included Alistair Cory, director, innovation science and technology campus at the University of Oxford, who said the university’s achievement of being the top rated one in the UK again was this year partly down to its response to Covid in a ‘dynamic, accelerated fashion’. Financial impacts were a big challenge, he added, albeit with Oxford having received more students than expected this year – but income from conferencing during the summer had also been hard hit. The university has had to take temporarily redundant space in the city, for instance, the Business School using the Oxford Playhouse.

Bidwells partner Richard Todd added that it was important not to overreact in terms of design. But in the same way that we might have thought it was difficult to accommodate naturally ventilated buildings with university security conditions five years ago or big open plan spaces with low energy consumption, we need to trust in our designers now. ‘We need to work harder now more than ever in creating multi-use spaces with different departments’, he said. ‘The combinations of engineering and computer sciences, the combination of science and technology start-ups sitting in the heart of an academic environment; that’s what modern design is for me. We have a responsibility to promote our ability to continue to deliver these complex projects and not let Covid move us into a retrograde step in terms of buildings being so isolated and so inflexible.’

During discussion, Todd added that there are also now signs of interest from students over the carbon performance or otherwise of university buildings. ‘That upwards pressure is only going to gain more and more traction’, he said. ‘There’s quite a bit of push’.


David Taylor

Editor, NLQ and New London Weekly


Education & Health

#NLAEducation #NLAHealth

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