News and Press

Stanton Williams gets off to a flying start at Cranfield University

30 May 2008, Building Design

By Tony McIntyre

Stanton Williams Architects’ student accommodation blocks for Cranfield University are the first step to realising its campus masterplan. Photos by Peter Cook/View

PROJECT TEAM
Architect Stanton Williams
Client Cranfield University
Contractor Mansell
Structural Engineers Barton Engineers
M&E Engineer KJ Tait
Quantity Surveyor Northcroft
Landscape Architect Christopher Bradley-Hole Landscape
Project Manager Schal
Planning Supervisor Davis Langdon

Cranfield University, between Luton and Bedford, is something of an architectural anomaly. Originally an RAF station founded in 1937, after the second world war it was turned into an aeronautical college; hangars and barracks were turned into labs, and mess halls converted to residential blocks.

Money was short and there was considerable political resistance to the institution, so the principle of adapting an old building to new uses without much care for appearance was understandable. Unfortunately, this ad hoc procedure survived its transformation into a technology institute in 1969, and in 1993 into Cranfield University.

The residential side of the campus is largely two-storey brick terraces and blocks, the layout of which looks as if someone carrying a box of architectural mediocrity had tripped and spilt it onto the pretty Bedfordshire landscape.

When Stanton Williams won the commission to provide 250 student rooms to replace some tired, low-density blocks — a student vote swung it in the practice’s favour over a rival proposal — the firm had already provided the university with a masterplan. This project was not just accommodation but the first small step to realising that plan, creating paths across and through accommodation “neighbourhoods”.

Current practice sees all residential blocks referring back to the streets, encouraging heavy car use and the attendant proliferation of parking space — this is after all hard by Milton Keynes. Stanton Williams’ plan foresees layouts to encourage foot traffic and cycling across a campus presently clogged with barriers.

Stringfellow Hall consists of five near-identical blocks, each of five storeys, aligned north-south astride a paved path that will eventually connect with others leading to the education buildings to the south. The brilliance of this design lies in the clarity of its propositions. The brief itself is elementary: en suite bedrooms with collective kitchens. This simplicity has produced some horror stories which, as the father of two university students, I have had reason to inspect up and down the country.

Stanton Williams, collaborating with landscaper Christopher Bradley-Hole, has set itself some strict rules, and these have held the project together even when financial restrictions started to carve away at the scheme.

Rooms are grouped in sixes — five people plus a kitchen — with two groups per floor. Blocks are offset so that glazed corridor ends look out to greenery. The decision not to block off the corridors gives generous natural light to hallways, and the staircases and rooms are even better lit. The rooms are glazed floor to ceiling, and have non-opening windows; louvered panels provide ventilation. Some students don’t know how to handle that much glass, and use various techniques to reduce it. The building seems strong enough to take it.

That strength comes from the simple formal devices used to tie things together. The blocks’ outer walls are red brick, while the inner walls, looking out onto the landscaped courtyard, are faced with a rainscreen of western red cedar. The screen is carried across the staircase setback, preventing the blocks from becoming too fragmented. This brick and timber palette picks up on a prevalent local feature, brick houses and close-boarded garden fences, and gives the courtyard a semi-private, sheltered character.

Landscape is a mixture of hard and soft, with an irregular line of maples running alongside a brick footway. Between the footway and the buildings are a number of smaller garden patches, some grass and reeds, others gravel. Each end of the site is planted with a wild flower garden.

The scale is well judged. The five-storey blocks give a density of development that contrasts well with the landscape glimpsed beyond. Equally, the two rows of buildings are the right height and distance apart so the courtyard space between them feels intentional, contained and owned by them.

On account of the tight building schedule — less than 12 months — tunnel-form concrete was used. Employing steel moulds, the intention had been to leave all internal walls as fair-faced concrete, but the finish did not quite live up to expectations.

As a result, staircases were painted over with a concrete paint, while rooms were plastered. Tunnel-form concrete offers good thermal mass, of course, plus excellent acoustic isolation, and speedy and reliable construction. Bathrooms were prefabricated in Italy and slotted into the building carcass.

Such schemes tend to be driven and value-engineered to the requirements of maintenance departments, whose expectations of human behaviour — no doubt tempered by experience — can lead to over-robust detailing. That has not happened here to any great extent, and even the maintenance men did not foresee students who had forgotten their keys simply breaking down the doors.

Budget cuts meant that an intended expression of floor slabs on the external brick skin had to be omitted. The peculiar detail that replaces this — bricks at slab level are recessed and the pointing raked, even though elsewhere it is flush — seems a mistake. The effect is of poorly made or patched brickwork — sometimes it is better just to let these ideas go.

That is a minor point, however. Other quibbles are with the university itself. It’s time that it put some maintenance effort into cleaning out the little brook that runs along the edge of the site to get rid of the concrete blocks and wire shopping baskets. It’s time the university treated the land it has with a little more respect. That it has built this scheme is a great start.