A new innovation building and student community at the heart of the central Oxford campus.

 The H B Allen Centre is a multi-faceted amenity for Keble College in Oxford. The primary function of the building is to deliver 250 graduate student bedrooms, much needed in the centre of the university city. The brief expanded to encompass a research hotel for visiting academics, a tech start-up incubator, teaching and research spaces, conference facilities, a café, common room and leisure amenities for the residents, and extensive external landscape, all within a 1.7 hectare site in the North Oxford Victorian Suburb Conservation Area, built around the Grade II listed Acland House by TG Jackson.

 Community of Technology and Academia

The generous ground and lower ground floor of public spaces (common rooms, teaching spaces, café) are clustered around a contemporary reinvention of the classic Oxford Quad. However, in this case skylights and sunken gardens visible at ground level give a clue that this green lawn conceals a 2500m2 light-filled basement, housing a generous technology incubator housing Oxford Sciences Innovation a fund that provides incubator and accelerator space for Oxford University graduate enterprises, and research space for the Oxford Robotics Institute, part of Oxford University Engineering Sciences.

 An efficient layout of graduate student rooms sit atop this public ground level and each corner is marked by a sculptural staircase with diagonal views across the quad providing light and orientation, leading to glazed entries to flat clusters at the upper levels. Clusters of six rooms share generous kitchens located near stairwells to encourage social interaction. A portion of the rooms are dedicated to the Executive MBA students who spend intensive six-week intervals in Oxford.

 The site offers a new pedestrian connection between Woodstock and Banbury Roads, providing crucial legible and accessible east-west connectivity across the Engineering Sciences and the still-developing Radcliffe Observatory Quarter. This improvement to the public realm encourages healthy movement between sites that is safe, welcoming, and encourages interaction between users by creating an outdoor social interface.

The large project was delivered in a constrained urban environment, and was delivered in two major phases, allowing students to occupy the accommodation areas for the academic year of 2018/19, while the fit-out works to the Woodstock Road Building and the tech incubator spaces continued simultaneously.

Social Value

The H B Allen Centre has enormous social contribution, and the community was engaged and involved throughout the design and construction process. The design period included an engaging period of consultation with the Keble College staff and students as well as local and statutory stakeholders including the Oxford City Council and English Heritage, with two public exhibitions and workshops for receiving feedback. There was intensive scrutiny of the Grade II listed Acland House at the centre of the site: ultimately it was decided that it should be retained to acknowledge the former life of the Acland Hospital, cementing this piece of social history at the heart of the H B Allen Centre.