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Refuting its name, New College is one of the most ancient and venerable of Oxfords colleges. Founded by William of Wykeham in 1379, it occupies a predictably grand huddle of ancient golden-stoned courts, if here bifurcated unusually by a crenellated fragment of Oxfords original city wall.The colleges oldest courtyard or quad in Oxford-speak was a radical departure when completed in 1403. Great Quad was the first purpose-designed, all-of-a-piece academic courtyard, combining chapel, great hall and student rooms arranged around it. It set the template for what became the default model for other Oxbridge colleges and universities for centuries.It was, typologically, a radical thing to do, putting un-alike building types and uses together in a whole, says David Kohn, founding director of David Kohn Architects (DKA), which recently completed its own addition to the College the Gradel Quadrangles (named after the main donor) a few hundred yards up the road. It provides a satellite college campus of 94 student rooms, study spaces, offices and performance space, with its own gatehouse and tower, together with classrooms, assembly hall and canteen for New College School.AdvertisementA walk around the old college campus takes you through the rich historical context into which DKAs new buildings were required to fit. Garden Quad, a second, late-17th century courtyard, was another architectural first in its time: an open-ended quad with buildings erected on only three of its four sides.It was a shift from the enclosed, walled courts of the 14th century, which segregated rowdy students from townsfolk [murders of and by students were not uncommon at the time] to a very open gesture, where you can see the town beyond, says Kohn. It coincided with New College inviting townsfolk to take up residence, for a fee. So the buildings form reflects the changing attitude between town and gown. I like the idea that architecture, be it at a glacial pace, can express changes in the society around it.The idea helped inform DKAs design for its latest addition. It sits to the north of the college precincts, in an area of Neogothic and Arts and Crafts villas built for dons around the turn of the 20th century. These are surrounded by large gardens a very different environment from the streets tightly lined by college walls and quads to the south.One of the villas on the site is Grade II-listed and the college had tried unsuccessfully several times to get planning permission to demolish an adjacent unlisted villa to redevelop as student housing. It was the colleges decision to masterplan the site as a whole that unlocked it, says Kohn, whose practice won the 2015 competition for the far more ambitious development of a new mini-campus. The scheme consists of three detached buildings: a small single-storey gatehouse; a seven-storey tower with a distinctive curlicue-profiled top; and a sinuous three-storey student housing block, arranged across the site like a deconstructed version of a college. As you approach, the ensemble presents a strikingly playful confection of forms rather Gaud-esque, with creamy limestone faades accented decoratively by pink sandstone.AdvertisementThe blocks are expressive in plan, too, with the main student housing block curving around a central horseshoe-shaped court, its curving sides creating further implied courtyard spaces between it and the adjacent Victorian college and school buildings that bookend it. Its as though the glacial evolution of the open-ended quad form to stretch the analogy has here reached melting point, the open-ended, softly rounded forms reflecting what DKA calls the fluid, open relationship between town and university today.Another key piece in unlocking the site was the realisation that the listing of the villa was specifically attached to its street front and west garden, so building was allowed close to its rear. This freed up space for the relatively bulky horseshoe-shaped block, which sits close to the villa at the rear, as well as against neighbouring buildings. The site was previously occupied in part by a 1970s school addition, which was demolished. The tight junctions would have been awkward with a more orthogonal building but here work comfortably, smoothed out by curved faades and features. Kohn says the layout was also influenced by an unpublished 1940s Pevsner essay on picturesque planning, which talks of the virtue of narrow spaces.It means the college has been able to house everything it needed to on the site: Important, given the arms race between colleges to build new facilities, says Kohn.The pink sandstone arch of the gatehouse-cum-porters lodge is heavily corniced and somewhat Classical in form, with a hint of Lutyens Delhi about it. It has provoked other comparisons. There was meant to be a green roof but one don thought it would make it look too Teletubbies-like, says Kohn.Through the grilled, geometrically patterned entrance gates, designed by artist Eva Rothschild, the view is framed to be scenographic, says Kohn. The new blocks and Arts and Crafts villa sit beyond a lawn and mature trees retained from the original gardens, like a Repton landscape in miniature. Kohn says: We worked with the conservation architect Marcus Beale, who was clear from the start that any successful development had to be landscape-led, incorporating the trees. This is certainly stagey architecture slightly mannered, as Kohn describes it.Seen close-up, the quality of the stonework of faades creamy Ancaster limestone flecked with grey and diagonally jointed is exceptional, given this was a Design and Build contract. Kohn has nothing but praise for the stone contractor, Grants of Shoreditch. The faades are dressed in a harder, pinker sandstone, which also forms cornices from which carved gargoyles and grotesques emerge another artists commission, this time Monster Chetwynd. We decided these should depict endangered animals which may become extinct during the lifetime of these buildings, says Kohn. One depicts the sleepy head of a golden mole popping out from the stonework, while another, a pangolin, hangs on for dear life at the top of the tower.The towers highly modelled silhouette reflects its extrusion from a trefoil-shaped plan a motif of three intersecting circles symbolising the Holy Trinity. DKA took its cue for this from the colleges Perpendicular chapel, where the motif is ubiquitous in the architecture. The shape is also picked up playfully in the designs of door handles and grilles elsewhere in the new buildings.The tower becomes more transparent the higher up it goes it was important that it didnt feel defensive with enlarged windows taking ever more expressive shapes as they go up, one resembling a theatre proscenium. Student rooms, grouped around kitchens, occupy lower floors, while the Gradel Institute of Charity, funded by the main donor too, in a slightly self-rewarding way occupies the upper levels of the tower with the best views for its offices.Kohn points to how the suns progress can be tracked incrementally across the undulating, south-facing faade of the main horizontal block, a bit like a sundial. It brings a dynamism to the architecture and makes it look curvier than it is, he observes.A sawtooth pattern of pink stone, nicknamed the flame cornice by DKA, runs across the top of the faades. Elsewhere, the cornice roller-coasters irregularly up and down over dormer windows, reflecting those of adjacent buildings. The roofs are prominently rounded. Kohn says: I like how, in the premodern era, roofs were very important parts of faades.The structure was changed from steel to timber during the design process, with the highly insulated roof covered in polygonal anodised aluminium tiles, fitted algorithymically together, which give it the appearance of a plump slab of fish, covered in silvery scales.While the buildings forms invoke the aforementioned Tellytubbies and fish-scale metaphors, they also call up a cacophony of architectural echoes: Gaud, certainly, but also the forms of the other traditions of early 20th century modernism before everything went orthogonal the flowing, moulded forms of Scharoun and Haring, the organic-expressionist fantasies of Hermann Finsterlin. I like the open-ended possibilities at the beginning of the 20th century. Lots of architects dont like Gaud and see his work as kitsch. But architecture should be expressive and communicative and flirt with form, says Kohn. He welcomes different readings of the building, saying: A building is collaborative, but its not so much about co-authors as an architect, I dont want to give up agency but about its users and readers. It needs to be open-ended and non-systemic enough to be read in different ways.The three storeys of the main block accommodate the majority of the student rooms, grouped around communal kitchens. The curves of the external envelope are still evident, if more subtly, in these spaces. The corridors visibly snake, pivoting off rounded stairwells lit from above by oculi. The shifting geometries allow for a variety of room shapes, including duplexes inspired by those at James Stirlings Florey building at nearby Queens College. But, where those are light-filled, these suffer from being somewhat cave-like under the curve of the roof, lit only by a low, horizontal window. In general, though, these are decent, comfortable rooms. Everywhere woodwork is painted in DKAs signature green. The heating arrives via ground-source heat pumps, delivered through an underfloor system. Due to the tightness of the site, one wing is split between the college and New College school, its volume filleted down the middle: one side student rooms, one side classrooms, canteen and school hall, the larger spaces raised cleverly, but counterintuitively, to the top of the building. Its pretty seamless, given the yin and yang contrast between calm academic quad to one side and noisy school playground to the other.At basement level sits a new 50-seat chamber concert-like performance space a classic box-in-a-box, designed with Charcoalblue which audiences can access down from the front quad, the entrance in line of sight from the porters lodge. While simply fitted-out, with acoustic spray-finished walls left visible behind oak baffles, the latter are crenellated to recall Oxfords city walls in the old college: another historical reference snuck in.Other interior spaces do not feel so resolved, nor so successful. The performance space is approached down a curving stair and through an enfilade of idiosyncratically shaped spaces. A slightly awkward skinny art gallery space feels like a leftover from the imposed geometries, while an octagonal basement lobby seems to have lost its function as the orientation space for which its geometry was intended. It was to have served a lecture theatre sitting under the quad, which was cut from the programme. The quality of the Design and Build-completed interiors is more par-for-the-course, too: odd service junctions, messy exposed ducting and handrails cutting across windows.Overall, though, this is quite a project: its play with decoration, historical form and iconography takes DKAs idea of communicative architecture, seen in previous projects such as the Red House and in the Design District, to another scale of complexity and urbanity. Even the distinctive DKA colours that define those projects, a definite red and green period for the practice, are here digested more subtly into pink stone and green sward.While the use of natural materials such as loadbearing stone faades and timber roof structure has helped bring the embodied carbon-count down (given the concrete basement and frame), they also contribute to the buildings forms soft but solid which Kohn describes as permanent but light in character. Even if you dont particularly like their unique appearance, they express a gently playful quality that positively animates the streets around.In places the form-making seems at the expense of the interior spaces, but I like the tale this architecture is telling and it clearly had the funding and client to allow it to be so fully told. Interestingly, Kohn mentions that, on the back of this project, Bob Stern has invited him to be the visiting professor of Classical architecture at Yale in spring 2027, coinciding with the first exhibition of Soanes drawings to be shown there. I like how Soane plays with Classical architecture, not as a given, but as a text for interpretation, says Kohn. One suspects he has taken a similar approach here.Architects viewThe Gradel Quadrangles are a major expansion of one of the University of Oxfords oldest colleges, designed to address the residential, study and pastoral needs of undergraduates at New College. The project provides 94 student bedrooms, a shared study space and a performance auditorium, alongside facilities for the adjacent New College School, and a landmark tower housing offices for the Gradel Institute of Charity.New College Oxford is architecturally significant: the first planned university quadrangle was built here in 1379, as well as the first open-sided quad in the 17th century. We sought to pursue that spirit of innovation and the trajectory of buildings gradually embracing the outside world with Oxfords first-ever curved quad. Sinuous elevations frame a series of landscaped spaces and the New College School playground. Departing from the typologys closed, quasi-monastic origins, the project seeks a more open and welcoming contemporary interpretation that shifts the relationship between university and city.Intrinsic to the inspiration of the building was a requirement that it should feel part of the main college, should be built for the long term and be something that is much more than a hall of residence. In response, we have created buildings with a distinct sense of place that are essentially collegiate but very much without precedent in their architecture and material treatment. A key element is a series of artworks made in collaboration with contemporary artists, including stone gargoyles and grotesques, representing the continuation of a creative tradition rooted in New Colleges medieval origins.David Kohn, director, David Kohn ArchitectsEngineers viewQuads and tiles are both known for being rectangular. New College Oxfords latest building has reinvented the idea of a quad in a curved plan.Early explorations in the design centred around building a curved roof over the curved quad a loadbearing vaulted roof, made of Catalan tiles cemented together with plaster of Paris. This way of building, used by Gaud and Gustavino, creates elegant, efficient structures, whose funicular shape is loaded compression; a vault can be vanishingly thin as a result. Sadly, the skills to build these roofs are also vanishingly rare and not practical to use on such a scale as the Gradel Quadrangles.Looking for alternatives, sprayed concrete seemed possible but, with a large basement, we had enough concrete in the scheme already, where it was really needed. So we started wondering whether our vaulted roof could be made in timber. We worked a few options using diagrids and CLT shells but the one that won out was simple curved laminated timber ribs skinned in OSB and planks. What was exciting was that the original craftsmanship envisaged in the tile layers making the vaults became digital craftsmanship, the timbers slotting together into shaped rebates with no need for steel connectors.The project concluded eight years after it began with the idea of tiles again, this time not to hold up the curved roof but to clad it. Working with the architects and contractors, we developed a method to clad the roof with 5,000 or so aluminium tiles of different shapes, devising a way to lay them out over the irregular surface with installers using their phones to map the positions with an augmented reality app.The other curves of the building are rendered in structure: the concrete frame cradles the curved floor plates and the stone walls, made in Ancaster limestone, dovetail together like the stones in a lighthouse wall.Tim Lucas, partner, Price & MyersClients viewWhen David Kohn Architects won the competition to design a new development at New College back in 2015, my predecessor described it as a highly significant project that would release the potential of an important central Oxford site whilst at the same time creating a piece of striking architecture that will match the quality of the rest of the college both timeless and sensitive to the environs.The Gradel Quadrangles are an outstanding fulfilment of that ambition, and allow us to address the residential, study and pastoral needs of our undergraduates. Many more of them can now live in college, with a level of comfort and facilities unparalleled by other new builds. Our auditorium the New Space is a hugely valuable addition, bearing in mind our very strong musical tradition. The new buildings for New College School work extremely well, and it is wonderful to see the schools young pupils enjoying the building together.Our brief demanded a sensitive solution to a very challenging design problem: reconciling exciting and innovative architecture within a particular Edwardian streetscape; the southernmost part of north Oxford. David Kohns decision to embrace the quadrangle typology drawing upon the rich architectural history here at New College but to create something entirely fresh has given us a range of outstanding new facilities and a building that, like the original New College buildings, will hopefully stand for centuries.When you walk into the Gradel Quadrangles, the first thing you see is a contemporary statue of our founder, William of Wykeham. He was an innovator, and David Kohn has emulated his spirit in a remarkable way. There is a truly collegiate sense of place but in a highly original form. Most important of all, our students just love living there.Miles Young, warden, New College, OxfordWorking detailThe parapet of the Main Quad building brings together many of the construction systems in the project. Vertically, the self-load-bearing stone faade, of 70mm-thick buff weatherbed Ancaster limestone from Lincolnshire, is topped off with contrasting pink Stoneraise blocks from Cumbria to create the flame cornice. This faade, beautifully built by Grants of Shoreditch, is laterally braced by ties to the concrete frame.This in turn supports a prefabricated timber roof structure made in Switzerland by Blumer Lehmann. The design of this element was carried out during construction in collaboration with structural engineers Price & Myers and earned the project an Institute of Civil Engineers Carbon Champion Award.The roof is topped with anodised aluminium polygonal tiles that were set out by the structural engineers using an algorithm that tessellated three, four, five, six and seven-sided tiles to cover the unique geometry of the roof with minimal joints.Projecting from the parapet is a bear gargoyle, one of 24 that represent the contemporary animal kingdom under threat from the climate crisis. These include a pangolin, golden mole, toucan, elephant and bushbaby, chosen in consultation with the professor of evolutionary biology at New College, Ashleigh Griffin, and suggestions from Katherine Rundell, author of The Golden Mole and Other Vanishing Treasure.The animal forms were created by artist Monster Chetwynd in collaboration with stonemason Fergus Wessel.David Kohn, director, David Kohn ArchitectsProject dataStart on siteOctober 2021CompletionApril 2024Gross internal floor area5,639m2Construction cost54.5 millionConstruction cost per m29,670ArchitectDavid Kohn ArchitectsClientNew College OxfordStructural engineerPrice & MyersM&E consultantSkelly & CouchQuantity surveyorArcadisProject managerRidgePrincipal designerOxford ArchitectsApproved building inspectorOxford City CouncilLandscape designTodd Longstaffe-GowanGate artistEva RothschildGrotesques/gargoyles artistMonster ChetwyndStonemasonFergus WesselPlanning consultantBidwellsTheatre consultantCharcoalblueStone faade contractorGrants of ShoredtichTimber roof specialistBlumer LehmannGate fabricatorThe White Wall CompanyMain contractorSir Robert McAlpineCAD software usedVectorworksSustainability dataPercentage of floor area with daylight factor >2%Not suppliedPercentage of floor area with daylight factor >5%Not suppliedOn-site energy generationNilHeating and hot water load (predicted)MQ*: 116.92 kWh/m2/yr , NCS: 54.31 kWh/m2/yr, NWH: 181.14 kWh/m2/yrTotal energy load (predicted)MQ: 128.4 kWh/m2/yr, NCS: 40.01 kWh/m2/yr, NWH: 189.83 kWh/m2/yrCarbon emissions (all) (predicted)MQ: 35.2 kgCO2/m2, NCS: 16.3 kgCO2/m2, NWH: 45.2 kgCO2/m2Annual mains water consumptionNot suppliedAirtightness at 50Pa (actual)MQ: 2.12 m3/hr/m2, NCS: 2.73 m3/hr/m2, NWH: 2.89 m3/hr/m2Overall thermal bridging heat transfer coefficient (Y-value)Not suppliedOverall area-weighted U-valueNot suppliedEmbodied / whole-life carbonNot suppliedPredicted design life100 years*MQ (Main Quad), NCS (New College School), NWH (New Warham House)
