The campus lies at the heart of Westminster, London, to the north of the new Paddington Basin development. The new dynamic campus emerges at the juncture of tradition and exciting new progress, a modern forum that embraces an exciting educational reform in possibly the world’s most multi-cultural city.
At CWC, we wanted to embrace a new way of thinking about learning and teaching as something also taking place outside of the classroom. Rethinking how those “unusable” spaces could be made infinitely more “usable” led the way for a new and more effective way of compiling architectural space. With innovative design we managed to double the floor area of the existing college facility within the constraints of the site and rights of light, whilst not exceeding the original height of the previous buildings.
The simple geometric concept revolves around a dynamic atrium space that constitutes the heart of the building. The entirely public ground level opens to the park on one side and the city on the other and accommodates a theatre and a “café on the green”. The first floor features a range of double height learning spaces that can be linked together to form larger areas. Rehearsal studios and lecture theatres also have internal connection with the meeting rooms downstairs for flexible usage. The second floor has a Digital Media Technology suite with views of the theatre rehearsal studios, as well as IT clusters and staff and administration areas. The third floor has flexible academic learning facilities with outdoor terraces and science labs with views of the park. There is surprising interconnectivity between several of the rooms and connections between indoor teaching and administration spaces and the outdoor terraces, encouraging both students and staff to use the green spaces.
The openness of the floor plates creates visual connections with the surroundings as well as throughout the building, encouraging chance encounters and unexpected juxtapositions, further enhancing the college’s goals for interaction and synergy between the departments.
A clear sense of navigation and openness also encourages a higher percentage of people to take advantage of the facilities available to them across different departments, making the college more than an educational institution but a place where students also choose to spend their leisure time. Various degrees of overview, overlap and segregation present the diverse student body with spaces for focused research, informal learning, and interaction.
