Homerton College Dining Hall – ADC

In recent years, Feilden Fowles have developed and pursued a mantra of ‘low-tech’, a ‘fabric first’ strategy that can be applied to the design of different building types at different scales. It has its origins in, and is defined by, a clear set of ecologically driven principles and intentions in relation to the built environment and beyond.

Physical manifestations of this mantra are evident at the site of their demountable studio in Waterloo, where timber structures of ascending scale have been built to provide shelter and beneficial working conditions for both human and non-human animals. But it is a strategy that goes beyond trapping carbon in wood based construction. And it is not anti-technology.

This review of their most recently completed project is a story of clay, concrete and timber in transformed states and how they have been fashioned with care, something approaching ‘craft’, to make an extraordinary new dining hall and ancillary spaces for Homerton College in Cambridge.

Homerton is the youngest, most populated and arguably the most progressive of Cambridge University’s colleges. Founded in 1768 as a teacher training institution by a group of dissenting academics, its original home was on Homerton High Street in Hackney, East London. In was not until 1894 that they moved to a site to the south of the city centre, built for the previous occupiers, Cavendish College, in the 1870s.

The college now comprises of a number of linked Gothic Revival and Arts and Crafts influenced structures arranged along the north side of the site, with extensive grounds to the south: lawns, woodland, ponds, sport fields with student accommodation buildings dispersed among and along their edges. The courtyard, the primary building block of Cambridge, was not pursued here.

The brief set for the competition for the dining hall, launched in 2016, was both ambitious and pragmatic. It asked for “an emblematic centrepiece…..that relates to the diverse mix of buildings around it and enhances the natural loveliness of the setting.”, but also that the building be “highly functional, able to service a diverse range of users and offer long-term flexibility.”

Up until now, students took their lunch and formal evening dinners in the Great Hall, a timber-roofed and walnut-panelled structure built in 1889. The hall had a convivial atmosphere, but its servery and kitchen were located in the depths of the building with no connection to the light or air outside. The space where food was served was little more than a metre wide.

These shortfalls and other issues relating to access and orientation have been addressed by Feilden Fowles in their lucid arrangement of the ensemble of new spaces – the dining hall, the servery, the kitchen, the toilets and a new buttery that connects with the Ibberson Building to the east and Harrison Drive to the north.

The plan is logical, cool, Euclidean: the colonnade and columns of the hall are set out on a 3-metre grid in two directions, a spatial order informed by Edmund Fowles visit to Hans van der Laan’s Roosenberg Abbey during the design process. A cloister like arrangement is employed for the buttery, a top and side lit circulatory space over two levels that was densely inhabited while I was photographing it by students completing essays or revising for their final exams.

The massiveness and structural clarity of the Hans van der Laan precedent is translated most clearly in the thermally broken in-situ pigmented concrete (50% GGBS) columns and beams that form a plinth around the dining hall and buttery. At the corners of the hall’s exterior, the columns are twice as thick with a quarter circle cast as a negative at their outer corner. The fine board marking of the columns and beams give their surfaces a strong haptic quality, yet they serve as an austere counterpoint to the shimmering skin of faience above.

The rippling and tapering forms of the green faience elements that adorn its outer surface derive from deft translations of elements found on the facades and roofs of existing college buildings. The tiles, 900 square metres of them, are arranged in a repeating pattern, given differentiation through subtle differences in colour and surface qualities. The embodied energy of this sumptuous material is not that much greater than that of a brick. It was therefore deemed the best solution to a façade that had to be both long lasting and opulent.

This extensive and extraordinary use of faience recalls Berlage’s Holland House, built in the City of London during the First World War. Like Holland House, the hall’s faience exterior appears as a continuous surface when viewed obliquely. When seen straight on, the clerestory windows that provide ample daylight to the hall are revealed.

The dining hall is inevitably the most important element of this project. The college desired an “emblematic centrepiece” and that is what they have been given and more. It is 27 metres long, 15 metres wide and 15 metres high at the highest point of its expressed valley roof. It has formal and structural similarities with ecclesiastical spaces, employing the vertical ordering device of base, triforium and clerestory.

Its expressed timber structure is daring in its slenderness and the eschewal of steel plates and bolts in its joints. Incredibly thin, blade-like columns support a butterfly truss, its rafters in turn supporting slender cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels above that have been concealed with painted acoustic plasterboard.

The column and truss elements are made from short thin planks of coppiced sweet chestnut finger-jointed along their length and laminated with glue. A cleverly configured interlocking lap joint is employed at the truss’s centre. A mortice and tenon joint, combined with a rebated shoulder, is used to connect the bottom struts of the truss with the columns. All of the glulam elements are located with seasoned oak pegs. These bespoke handcrafted joints and connections are inherently low-tech, their design enabled by Feilden Fowles’ ongoing collaboration with Peter Laidler of Structure Workshop, an inspiring engineer who is equally happy working with pencil or parametrics.

It was intended that the coppiced sweet chestnut would be sourced from the southern counties of the UK, but the nominated supplier could not produce the glulam beams. Instead they were sourced from Spain, a disappointing outcome. But building materials, like food, have always had to travel, especially timber, as construction grade hardwoods and softwoods are rightly sourced from trees grown in the right soil and climatic conditions. These conditions are now changing at a troublingly fast rate.

Experientially, the hall is a delight. Its ground plane has a luxurious quality. Terrazzo of different shades of green, arranged in a triangular pattern, makes a surface that is both rich and robust. The sweet chestnut columns are clad with brass as they meet the ground. The generous openings to the south frame views of lawn and woodland. Feilden Fowles hope that the trees might one day be extended up to the building’s terrace.

The veneered timber boards that line the triforium are gently angled to receive different types of light and descend in size as they move up the wall. This simply articulated surface contributes to the hall’s well judged acoustic qualities – it has quite a long reverberation time that results in an agreeable overall noise level that does not interfere with local conversations at the table.

The architects have paid equal attention to the background spaces of the project. They have made sure that the people preparing food, or cooking it, or washing up after the food has been eaten, have a visual connection both to the hall and to the outside. The kitchen is sited in one of two brick faced volumes, the other housing toilets, lift and administrative spaces that face on to Harrison Drive at the north. They bring a significant and positive change of character to the street. Where there was once a continuous fence to the Homerton site, there is now a new glazed entrance between the two elegantly detailed brick facades employing recessed bays and a Flemish bond pattern. The bricks are bonded together with 14mm thick, brushed lime joints, giving the building surface an enjoyably primitive quality.

Considerable attention was given to the future operational energy of the project. It is an all-electric building. For most of the year round, the hall is passively ventilated through opening elements in the north facing clerestory fenestration. In colder months, heat is recovered from the kitchen cooking hoods and sent back into the hall. The provision of hot water and heat is augmented by the installment of ground source heat pumps under the lawn. And no plastic is used in the servery, apart from the trays that students and staff use to their carry food.

The high quality of this project, both architecturally and environmentally, is an incredible achievement for a still young practice. The buildings have many powerful thresholds, some carefully orchestrated relationships between different scales of space and rigorous thoughts about how materials should be used and how their detail can be resolved with care – a lesson for all of us.