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