A raucous urban dance extravaganza might not be every librarian’s idea of a welcome backdrop to their bookshelves. But then not every library is conceived like Town House. From the open-plan study floors of this £50m addition to Kingston University, you can look down into a dramatic triple-height performance space and straight across into the dance studios, where students flex their limbs on wall barres opposite pharmacologists deep in textbooks.
“We were attracted by the university’s radical ambition to mix things that are usually incompatible,” says Yvonne Farrell of Grafton Architects, the Irish practice responsible for this majestic multilevelled theatre of higher education that has just opened in south-west London. “The building takes pleasure in these abrasions, combining the two extremes of silence and noise.”
Standing on the former site of some unprepossessing temporary buildings that had outstayed their welcome, the Town House has the bold civic presence of a public facility – which, it turns out, it is. In a brave departure from most security-conscious university buildings, there are no turnstiles or swipe-card access gates to be found here. Instead, an airy atrium welcomes people in through a street-front colonnade, where a ground floor cafe sits beneath a wide open stairway that zig-zags up through the five-storey lobby. The summit is crowned with another public cafe, complete with a roof terrace that commands panoramic views across to Hampton Court Palace and the Thames, twinkling in the distance between the trees.
This is the first building in the UK for Grafton, and the timing is fitting. Farrell and her co-founder Shelley McNamara will be awarded the 2020 RIBA gold medal next month, in recognition of their powerful body of work around the world. Since the Dublin duo founded their firm in 1978, they have built a reputation for crafting muscular structures that revel in their sheer heft, enjoying the play of light and people across massive volumes of concrete and stone. Their buildings often have an archaic, timeless air, standing as robust armatures that could be occupied in any number of ways.
Their heroic facility for the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología in Lima, Peru – crowned the best building in the world in 2017 – stands as a modern day Machu Picchu, a world of terraces and walkways woven into a concrete cliff face. Kington’s Town House takes many of the same ideas of processional circulation, views between levels and interconnected terraces, but filters them through an urbane English lens, dressing the principles in a polite costume for the royal borough. The calibre of the design is an important symbol for the university, too.
“World-class architecture isn’t just the preserve of the Russell Group,” says Kingston’s vice-chancellor, Steven Spier, himself a trained architect. “Fifty-five per cent of our students are from BAME backgrounds, and many are the first generation in their families to go to university, so we wanted to provide something aspirational.”
With its chunky white concrete frame rising proudly from the pavement, holding a series of cascading terraces on the facade, the Town House is certainly a grand step up from the existing motley collection of faculty buildings nearby. Inside, it embodies the university’s desire for a “learning landscape”, with landings flowing into the library, which in turn flows into project rooms and dance spaces, with little of the compartmentalised sense that many academic buildings suffer from. Above all, it feels social, designed to encourage encounters.
“It’s like a big crossroads,” Farrell enthuses, visibly thrilled at the level of buzz in the building, as a gaggle of hijab-wearing girls comes down the staircase mid-gossip, while a group of boys saunters past, eyeing up who’s here. “Why do you come to university, when you can study online?” she adds. “It’s about meeting people and falling in love.”
In use for just a few weeks, the building is already thronging; indeed, it feels like there’s a slight danger it might prove too popular for its own good. The library saw a leap in visitor numbers from 350 people on the first day of term last year, in its former dingy incarnation, to 6,000 on the same day this year. On a January afternoon, most study tables are occupied and all seats taken in the lounge areas. It will be interesting to see how it copes come exam time; 7,000 students study at this campus and the building has a capacity of 2,500.
This is an enticing place to walk around as a nosy visitor, catching continual glimpses between the different spaces, but one wonders if the level of transparency and views might sometimes feel a bit much, as if you’re in a goldfish bowl, always on display. Even the “black box” studio space has a big window looking in from the main lobby (although I’m told it can be blacked out). There’s something to be said for a study space where you can squirrel yourself away without the distraction of gyrating Lycra-clad bodies, or the street life outside passing by through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
A world without walls also raises the question of noise. Norman Foster’s equally open-plan law library for the University of Cambridge famously suffered from “disastrous” acoustics, with nothing to stop sound from the ground floor public spaces echoing up into the study areas. Grafton assure that large panels of Weetabixy wood wool and soft acoustic linings are sufficient to dampen the sound, while the library has graduated levels of noise as you rise through the building, with a talking floor, a whispering floor and a totally silent floor, which seems to be working so far.
Grafton are particularly fond of celebrating the movement of people through their buildings, but there’s a slight sense here that the desire to choreograph a vertical spectacle of activity across the building’s facade has led to circuitous, confusing circulation. There are innumerable outdoor terraces scattered across the different levels (which will be a boon come summertime), some of which are connected by stairs, others of which aren’t.
It turns out that the route down the northern side of the building is now only to be used as a fire escape, because of the proximity of residential neighbours who don’t want to be overlooked. Trying to leave via the suggested outdoor route, I’m stumped by locked doors, dead ends and walkways to nowhere, and have to retrace my steps. Still, perhaps it’s all part of the convivial, match-making aspect of the building’s role. You might just bump into someone special lingering on a balcony while you’re trying to find the exit.
