Architecture
Double-Decker
By TERENCE BENDIXSON
DESIGNING a building to satisfy the needs of a community is to
an architect roughly what writing a symphony is to a composer. For the one the components are rooms and spaces suited to different activities, for the other instru- ments capable of various sounds, but for both the aim is to achieve a whole that has greater significance than its parts.
A recent architectural exercise of symphonic complexity is a hostel for 400 students designed by Richard, Sheppard, Robson and Partners for the Imperial College of Science and Technology. The building is just off Exhibition Road and its rooms look northwards to the plane trees of Princes Gardens and southwards to the blue- black dome of the Brompton Oratory and the icing sugar crown of the Victoria and Albert.
In cities where land is expensive and high buildings are almost unavoidable, student hostels tend to be reduced to honeycombs of little one- man boxes sitting on groups of common rooms. Unfortunately this kind of building offers its occupants only the privacy of their cells and the hurly-burly of a forum. At Princes Gardens the architects have attempted to enrich this austere contrast by forming four halls of residence, each with its own suite of common rooms, within the mass of the hostel. The halls are stacked two above two and inside them further fragmenta- tion has been achieved by grouping the study- bedrooms on cul-de-sac staircases in the Oxford and Cambridge manner.
This means that a student's journey from his room to the cafeteria or dining hall is through a gentle succession of increasingly wider social horizons. He may meet in turn any one of the three people with whom he shares a bathroom and lavatory, the seven on his landing, the twenty-three on his elliptical staircase, the hundred or so in the common room of his hall of residence and then the full 400 at dances, meet- ings or meals in the great hall. In terms of ever- broadening spaces such a trip is similar to travelling from a tiny, tree-shrouded brook, down a river, across a delta and into the sea.
To a large extent this internal organisation is revealed on the outside of the building by volumes as distinct from one another and as expressive of their uses as the belfry, nave and chancel of a gothic church. A broad podium forms one block and is filled with big spaces such as common rooms for the academic staff, the student cafeteria and the great hall. A stair- case of Piranesian magnificence bridges the foyer to the hall and bursts through the podium on to a broad terrace in front of the common rooms of the two lower halls of residence. Above them rises a slab containing four strongly modelled blocks of study bedrooms. The common rooms of the upper halls of residence are on the fifth floor and are marked by long recessed balconies. Inside the slab there are no corridors and to get to the study bedrooms you take a lift to either the first or fifth floor and then resort to leg work on one of the staircases.
Since 1932, when Le Corbusier's Swiss Dormitory was completed at the UniversitY City in Paris, a number of architects have devised variations on his formula of a high block of student rooms next to the low group of com- mon rooms, but none has incorporated staircase clusters of rooms in it. Imperial College's double- decker hostel is therefore remarkable for combining the privacy and intimacy of the monastic staircase with the scale of building dictated by city land values : it is also impres- sive as a piece of boldly plastic architecture.
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