The Royal College of Art’s new £135m design and innovation campus designed by Herzog & de Meuron
(Picture: Iwan Baan)Some 86 per cent of the British public has never set foot on a university campus, never mind studied on one, Dr Paul Thompson, Vice-Chancellor of the Royal College of Art, tells me. It’s a sobering figure, and indicative of a shift that has been a long time in the making.
From its origins in the 1851 Great Exhibition, the RCA and its antecedents have been putting art in service of industry. And for several years in a row, the RCA has been named the world’s best art and design university. And yet, during those years, there has been a steady move from what you might call the directly “arty” to STEAM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) at the college, and this has been reflected in an architectural shift - away from South Kensington to its new Battersea campus.
Over the past decade a series of fine sawtooth-roofed facilities has been built here by architect Haworth Tompkins. Absolutely great for the students inside but, in retrospect, they are rather hermetic structures and are all but impenetrable to outsiders (Hester Road by Battersea Bridge in particular is now faintly hostile).
That’s why the jury looking for the architects for the next campus venture unanimously chose Herzog & DeMeuron, the Swiss practice best known in London for Tate Modern and its Switch House extension. They presented a streetscape, rather than just a building.
“We want it to be a building that looks outwards rather than inwards – a language of people moving through the site” says Herzog & DeMeuron project director John O’Mara, when he takes me on a first-look tour of the £135 million new building at Battersea, which houses studios, workshops and a research tower.
It deploys the Switch House vocabulary of bristly brick, patterned almost to the point of a woven texture. There’s an eight-storey tower clad in matte white fins and mighty cantilevers forming balconies that run the entire length of Howie Street.
It is also conceived of as a more permeable building than those elsewhere on the campus, and forms a city block. There are external routes through between adjacent streets, shopfront windows onto ground floor workshops and further openable windows behind perforated brick screens. There’s also a long brick bench sheltered by one of the gargantuan cantilevers.
Punctuating the horizontal block’s length is another cross-route – the Hanger. This soaring double multi-purpose space has glazed doors at either end, that open up to the point of allowing a vehicle to be driven inside, should an exhibition or performance demand it. The floor is of highly-polished asphalt set with chips forming possibly the most glamorous, terrazzo-like, road surface ever. It continues the inside-outside theme. Internal routes for the 530-odd students plus staff are private, and run at right angles through the block.
This is a building that aims to accommodate the future. The tower contains laboratories with more massive glass doors that allow access for experimental cars, a testing tank for aquatic drones and a high cage for flying drones that pops up like a lantern into the roofscape.
Above the labs are other spaces dedicated to research into matters such as robotics and virtual reality, ageing and the climate crisis, and the InnovationRCA spaces that foster techie start-ups among alumni. InnovationRCA (the school’s centre for entrepreneurship and commercialisation) is elegantly connected by one of Herzog & DeMeuron’s signature steel blade staircases to a conference room penthouse. Curtain partitions offer a contrasting, almost domestic note.
It is big, bold, and beautiful, almost Brutalist in its swagger, reflecting the confidence of an organisation that counts the likes of Sir James Dyson and Thomas Heatherwick among its alumni (and let’s not even get started on the artists). What creations will emerge from it even in 30 years time is unimaginable, given the pace of technological change, but the building, says Thompson, “will last 100 years”.
For a place that prides itself on its forward-thinking, it’s rather awkward that a brief glance at the “RCA Luminaries” page of the website features six men and women, all of whom are white. Thompson though is keen to stress the school’s attempts to improve diversity and inclusion: 30 percent of start-up founders are women; 30 percent people of colour (with overlap, of course), he tells me. A £1 million annual scholarship programme aimed at doubling the percentage of Black British and other racial minority students has been established. Yet minority group students, other than those drawn to the RCA as overseas candidates, are still woefully low – as they are in similar institutions.
Appearances, then, are not so much deceptive as, perhaps, overly hopeful. Given the British obsession with surveillance in the age of the War on Terror, the RCA, like other campuses, are not physically open to all, with security guards, gates and passes preventing the kind of free-range access once common in, say, red-brick universities. The cross routes through the new building are gated; the Hanger doors will often be closed. Genuine permeability is highly limited, with the public only given access to a few limited areas at particular times. Thompson’s suggestion that people can “look at it while waiting for a bus” on Battersea Bridge Road is unconvincing.
The campus’s most open building used to be the rough and ready student bar nearby, within a charming former dairy depot. You could just wander in - bought by a developer though, it has now been demolished and remains a pile of Victorian bricks.
Contrast this with the 2009 school of architecture in Nantes, France, by architects Lacaton & Vassal, who were also shortlisted for the Battersea job. It is famously and genuinely open to the passer-by, its low-cost utility chic including a tarmac ramp that runs up into the building, and offering the sort of rough and ready opportunities for improvisation beloved of art students. Teaching, admin, circulation and even parking are intertwined. The RCA by contrast is still pretty much a closed shop – if a very handsome one.
This is not a failure of the architecture but of the system. A lack of public investment in the increasingly corporatised sector by British governments, and student fees remain significant barriers to inclusion. The Treasury coughed up £54 million for the project on the basis of InnovationRCA doubling its alumni start-ups. It’s true that the hierarchy of the new spaces reflects priorities to some degree – a conference space for hire at the tower’s top is telling. But the architectural is never a cure-all for society’s ills; it often simply reflects them.
That said, how can you aspire to something you can barely even glimpse?
