Wadham College Competition

Invited competition for a new student building

Location: Oxford

, UK

Status: Competition shortlisted

Client: Wadham College

2016

Wadham College, Oxford, invited us to compete for a new student building to replace an inaccessible 1950s block in Back Quad. The site sits between the college's early 17th-century gabled buildings and later additions from the 1970s to the 1990s. The brief combined an Undergraduate Centre with an Aspiration Centre for young people considering Oxford. Two intersecting gabled forms echo the college's buildings, and new passageways reconnect quads that had been separated for decades.

The Undergraduate Centre was designed to strengthen the mixed undergraduate community with spaces to socialise, work and meet. The Aspiration Centre was envisaged as an open focal point with two large seminar rooms for visiting young people and summer schools. Key social and informal study spaces sit at the intersection of the two gabled forms, with double and triple-height spaces linking the ground floor to the levels above. Three ground-floor passageways and a covered walkway resolve circulation problems in this part of the college.