There’s a lot of talk around about “beauty”. Social media is littered with posts of golden, old, sun-drenched buildings, in which some self-appointed wise man hands down aphorisms on their “spiritual significance”. They come with lamentations that we live in fallen times, that our “morally depraved” society has thoughtlessly tossed away a treasury of beautiful design, sometimes also with a side order of supremacist dog whistle – the buildings in question being mostly classical or Christian rather than Islamic or Hindu – and incel-arousing appeals to “traditional manhood”.
To which one might say, yes, a Parisian boulevard, or a gothic cathedral, or a Greek temple, is beautiful – we can all see that – but why the zero-sum game? Why not see the beauty in modern buildings? Why only in buildings that have pointed arches or classical columns, or some other signifier of tradition?
Something genuinely beautiful, without an acanthus leaf or a finial in sight, has been built in Clare College, Cambridge. It’s not something you can capture in an online snapshot, but through experiencing it in three dimensions. It is a work of time, both in the way new fabric interacts with the old and in the ways it reveals itself as you move through it. The project’s strengths lie in the thoughtfulness with which it is made and the grace with which tangled problems are eased. Its architects are Witherford Watson Mann, who have previous experience with bringing crumbly old walls to life, with their Stirling prize-winning renovation of Astley Castle in Warwickshire. They find enjoyment in the project’s complexity, while also bringing harmony to the whole. It’s a calm building.
The new River Wing, as it is called, is part of a larger, £42m transformation of the college. The wing provides a new waterside cafe, where Clare’s junior and senior members can mix. Beyond that, a large part of its purpose is to make the venerable old building that it adjoins – a layer cake of uses that includes a grand dining hall, a more exclusive room for fellows, and student rooms on top – work better. It adds stairs and galleries and lifts and back-of-house facilities that make them accessible to people with limited mobility, safer in the event of fire, and generally better-functioning. Where in other hands this brief could have led only to a piece of constructional equipment – a ramp here, an escape staircase there, some lifts and plumbing – an informal kind of ceremony is brought to addressing these essential and civilising tasks.
The new work, built by Barnes Construction, is inserted, in a process that the architects compare to putting a ship in a bottle, into a long splinter of space that runs from the quiet street on which the college’s entrance sits to the edge of the punt-strewn River Cam. 120 metres long, it widens from only one metre at one end to eight metres at the other, this being all that was available on a site filled since the 17th and 18th centuries with classical stone buildings that are now Grade I listed.
Further restrictions were added by the scruples of town planners. Although the wing is added to the workaday back of the old buildings, they stand in a much-photographed view from a 20th-century bridge over the river of the world-famous chapel of King’s College. So its height was limited and its detailed appearance scrutinised. At the same time that it has to perform all its practical tasks, the new building is on a public stage.
Its structure, for reasons of logistics and sustainability, is a frame in engineered oak, made in pieces in South Yorkshire by the specialist company Constructional Timber, its joints computer-cut and the holes for its fixings pre-drilled, and then put together on site over a space of 20 weeks by a three-person team. The species of timber of Elizabethan warships and pub beams, in other words, is treated with the precision of steel. Its clean lines run rhythmically through the project, even as it weaves around 300-year-old chimney stacks and patched and wobbly ancient brickwork.
The project’s multilayered circulation, while serving the movement of students and staff going to get their lunch and getting around the building, becomes an object of intrigue, with glimpses up and through a glazed, oak-framed tower that contains one of the most crafted fire escapes known to contemporary architecture. There are pocket courtyards formed around the old structure, and landings and stairs looking on to each other. Sunlight enters from unexpected angles and bounces off the sheen of the floor. Eventually the intricacy unknots, as you pass along a gently sloping passage to the more regular and ample cafe, or upwards to a broad glazed gallery for the use of senior fellows.
There are interplays of rough and smooth, sharp and rugged. There are further registers of time, geological, organic and human, in the fossil-rich Purbeck stone of which the floors are made, in the grain of the wood, and in the visible evidence of craft – of the patient hours and days, that is, spent putting the building together. You feel the differences between stone, brick, timber, glass and the bronze-coloured steel used on some of the stairs.
At the same time, the different materials cohere, both with each other and the older spaces. An evenness of tone, mostly in the middle between dark and light, helps achieve this quality. So does the consistent attitude of the architects, attentive to detail but not fussy. Creative thought is given throughout to such questions as the direction of flaws and grain in the stone, the protection of finishes from the wheels of trolleys, the curve of handrails, the ways that different materials join and connect. There’s also a wheelchair lift at the main entrance to the great hall that features retractable stone steps. This would be wonderfully ingenious so long as it works, which on my visit it did not.
This project’s Tudor-tech spirit extends to its exterior, visible mostly from that bridge and from the neighbouring college of Trinity Hall, in which vertical timbers frame tall panels of glass and brick that echo the proportions of the old building’s chimneys. The oblique line of the escape stair, visible on the outside, then interrupts the general rectangularity. As on the inside, regular and irregular interact.
The new River Wing is nearly perfect on its own terms, the only big disappointment (apart from that wheelchair lift) being the fact that the magnificent escape stair is not available for everyday use. It’s also further evidence of the fact that so much of the best contemporary British architecture is commissioned by well-resourced Russell Group universities, and Oxbridge colleges in particular. It would be good to find comparable quality in less rarefied places. But that’s not the fault of Clare College, or of Witherford Watson Mann.
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