RCA Battersea South Campus – ADC

Architecture, it is often said, reflects the conditions in which it is made. But it can also anticipate the future. Herzog & de Meuron is a particular master at adapting building typologies to provide space for activities we didn’t know we needed. Tate Modern is the classic example: the practice’s transformation of Bankside Power Station in 2000 was simultaneously challenging and liberating. At first the new Tate was criticised for having a hollow core – the galleries seemed to be organised around a vacuum. But over time the giant  space of the Turbine Hall has proved to be its greatest asset, giving artists the opportunity to expand their practice, and audiences the permission to enter and participate in ways we could scarcely have imagined.

At a time of social presentism, where the past is easily forgotten and an alternative future is hard to imagine, a major project by Herzog & de Meuron is something to take a great interest in. At the opening of the RCA Battersea building, Jacques Herzog said something deceptively simple: ‘You can only see the difference in the context of time when you are looking back.’ It was as if he was speaking in code to the critics to say, if you don’t like this building now, you will in the future.

Providing an additional 15,500 square metre site for the college, the Battersea building can be seen as a space for growth and change. Commissioned efficiently in 2016 when the RCA acquired the site, secured funding and appointed the architect, its design doesn’t just anticipate a future need, it responds to change that has already taken place – most notably a growth in student numbers over the next five years from 2300 to 3000, the addition of many new postgraduate programmes and a shift in focus towards science and technology with the college attracting major research funds. This latter move came in tandem with a government grant of £54m which has made the new building possible.

The wider backdrop is a long-term undermining of arts education at all levels in the UK, where arts subjects have been squeezed out of the school curriculum and dismissed as low-value university degrees. And yet, over the past 20 years there has been a huge expansion in the audience for the arts, and a reclassification of the sector as an ‘industry’ that is measured using similar metrics to other areas of the economy. We can hardly be surprised then, if art schools evolve a new architectural form to reflect the status of the arts as an ‘industry’. According to Herzog, ‘the flash of inspiration should take place within the building’, implying that the architecture itself needs to be more pragmatic, less vain and instead a ‘horizontal exchange’ between art, science and technology.

When students inhabit the Battersea building it will be the RCA’s most expansive move since the opening of Hugh Casson and Jim Cadbury-Brown’s Darwin Building in Kensington in 1961; and completes a cycle of new projects in the area that includes buildings by Haworth Tompkins dating t02009. Before the Darwin Building, the RCA occupied premises adjacent to the V&A in South Kensington, and before that in Somerset House where it was founded as the Government School of Design in 1837.

Despite their focus on the future, the architect was fully cognisant of the history and went to great lengths to understand the fluid character of the RCA and in particular, the dynamic relationship between architecture and social life at the Darwin Building. They also reflected on their own experience of designing and running a studio in Basel, where the making process takes place in the most visible social spaces of the office, spilling out into a courtyard.

The result takes a very different form to the Darwin Building, but some of its characteristics are present – notably a strong emphasis on shared, unprogrammed spaces including terraces and open outdoor balconies where students can mill around. Ground-floor workshops, many of them equipped with impressive robotic fabrication tools, form a pedestal for platforms of activity above and are interwoven with gathering places, some of which are open to the public.

In practical terms, the Battersea building is L-shaped in plan and slots around an existing row of domestic-scale Victorian terraces on the corner of Parkgate Street and Battersea Bridge Road. It breaks down into an eight-storey, orthogonal tower (the Rausing Research & Innovation Building) and a linear, four-storey Studio Building, which runs along Howie Street adjacent to the 2012 Dyson Building.

As at the Kensington site, where passers-by can see into the ground floor studios and lower-ground art shop and workshops, the Battersea building offers selective views of the making process. At the Darwin Building there was once a public gallery with an entrance adjacent to the Royal Albert Hall, which encouraged the public to attend student exhibitions. Similarly in Battersea at ground level the public can walk in directly from the street to visit events and exhibitions, and even to use the cafes and social spaces. The division between public and privately accessed parts of the college is refreshingly blurred, unlike some colleges where visitors are greeted by banks of security barriers.

But despite gestures to the public and the local community, the overall impression is of a solid, protective mass of a building not dissimilar in texture to the dense section of a Tunnock wafer. This juxtaposition of low-lying, horizontal wafer biscuit with vertical, clean white tower seems to match the two main activities of the site: the messy, social and physical side of the college’s activity with the cerebral, business, innovation and research activities.

Of course, the division is not as straightforward as that, but while the Studio Building has a looseness in the arrangement of studios and shared spaces, the tower is more tightly planned and is clad with rippling white metal fins that make a statement about the RCA’s commitment to innovation and science.

Looseness and flexibility are drivers for the design of the Studio Building, in which three 2000-square-metre floor plates provide robust open spaces that can be reconfigured for any programme. The third floor has stunning studios flooded with light from a north-facing clerestory, which double up as auditoria for catwalk shows.

The atmosphere changes in the sculpture studios below, which are divided using ‘sacrificial’ plywood walls. This floor feels more inviting as a workspace, partly as a result of a slag being added to the concrete soffit to warm up the colour tone. Large red electrical cable reels hang down from the ceiling – a practical solution, but the bright red of the plastic looks joyful and dynamic against the concrete. Rector Paul Thompson explains with glee that the floor slab has been reinforced with an extra 100mm layer of concrete to allow for students to cut into it, Matta-Clark style.

The loose fit arrangement of activities is reflected on the outside of the building – the upper floors appear to slide over each other and to one side of the base. At the corner this creates a dynamic effect where the cantilevered first floor creates a covered walkway along Howie Street leading to the main entrance.

Along Battersea Bridge Road, with its pubs, shops and restaurants, the pedestal opens up to a large glass window that allows the public to look directly into one of the fabrication workshops. On this side, the building takes its place as a satisfying backdrop to bus stops, lampposts and electricity junction boxes, and the brown textured brick looks particularly good when a double-decker goes past on its way to the neighbouring depot.

The Battersea building is really all about the textured brickwork, which we’re familiar with from Tate Modern and its younger sibling, the Blavatnik Building (2016). Herzog and de Meuron explored new possibilities with brick at Bankside, creating perforated screens and textured, angular walls. There are clear similarities, but at Battersea the use of brick conveys the idea of process and making more explicitly. For example, around windows the brick seems to be unfinished, producing a jagged edge that suggests a student might have knocked through with a sledge hammer. Perforations in the brickwork around the walkways allow shadowy views of movement from the outside and patterns of light on the inside.

New buildings are usually photographed and viewed by critics when they’re empty and pristine, but this is a container to be filled with life, ideas and colour. The focus of ‘streetlife’ in the building is what is called the Hangar, a double-height space that cuts north-south through the Studio Building and is described as ‘a focal point for RCA artists and makers and their interactions with the public’. While not hangar-like in scale, vehicles can drive straight in from the street when the doors are folded back on a continuous road surface. A beautiful, inventive detail is the floor which is standard tarmac polished to the degree that it looks like an expensive terrazzo.

Interior details and finishes follow a similar pragmatic, unfussy approach and industrial materials bring their own decorative geometry rather than anything being applied. Galvanised steel grid is used both as a suspended ceiling and to form a mezzanine balcony around the Hangar. A curved steel section forms a rough-edged handrail, a detail that is repeated on balconies on the upper floors. There is texture and pattern, but this isn’t a building you want to stroke lovingly – the passing of time and patterns of use will be the invisible forces that in the long term will bring humanity and warmth.

Right now the Battersea building is the RCA offspring that is hard to love, particularly for the tutors and alumni who are (perhaps rightfully) nostalgic for the old days of the Darwin Building library, Student Union bar and the much loved Senior Common Room with its paintings, family photos and leather furniture. Like a child on the brink of adulthood, the Battersea building is slightly awkward, rough round the edges and born with a whole set of different values.