Exeter College Cohen Quadrangle

Exeter College Cohen Quadrangle, Oxford is a 21st century reinvention of the ‘collegiate quadrangle’, the basis of Oxford’s academic and urban fabric. The Oxford quadrangle is an 800 year old pedagogical model that combines student rooms with teaching spaces, organised around landscaped courtyards. The 6000 m², new-build Cohen Quad expands Exeter College’s 700 year old campus in the heart of Oxford, with undergraduate and graduate living accommodation for 90 students, an auditorium, seminar rooms, archive, café, roof terraces, offices, fellows’ accommodation and Oxford University’s first dedicated social learning space. This complex building was designed within a highly constrained Conservation Area site and Grade II Listed Building context, to deliver Oxford’s first fully inclusive and barrier free quad. Our over-riding concept of a ‘scholarly home’ is characterised by an all-embracing stainless steel shingle roof, marking the new building on Oxford’s skyline. The building is conceived as a journey; a three dimensional Oxonian narrative that weaves between two courtyards to offer a surprising array of perspectives on adjacent landscapes and streetscapes. To respond to the constrained site, the new Quad is organised as an S-shaped plan that weaves between two new courtyards. This is a narrative route that connects the college’s public and courtyard spaces with a series of cloisters, amphitheatre staircases, landings and garden walks. The traditional Quad arrangements of courtyard and cloister, façade and roof, have been reconfigured to intertwine and merge, loosening spatial relationships and blurring programmatic boundaries while offering a ‘coherent informality’ to a largely residential urban context. Every corridor, corner and roofspace has been conceived as a place to dwell and opportunity to gather. The historic Grade II Listed English Baroque 1913 Ruskin College façade has been retained for it’s significant historic value, representing the 19th Century educational reform movement in Oxford. ”Windows and views in every corner and at every turning make one feel a secret spectator of the beauty of the surrounding city” Dame Frances Cairncross DBE FRSE, Rector of Exeter College 2004-2014 The Cohen Quad houses an academic community within the collegiate model of education, incorporating teaching and living spaces. A sequence of cloisters with subtly expanding and compressing elliptical geometries invite movement through the building. The first, cross-laminated timber cloister forms an ellipsoidal space that acts as a room as well as a passage. Visible from the building’s entrance, the second, concrete cloister is spatially convex, encouraging movement towards the auditorium. A multi-level commons space at the centre of the S-shaped plan is the new Quad’s social heart, opening onto both courtyards and offers a range of informal living rooms, open and hidden study areas, a sweeping staircase and double height café within the multi-level Learning Commons. Transparency and light form a central part of the Cohen Quad design concept and experience. The Learning Commons are lined with double storey glazed walls, creating a visual connection to its landscaped courts. At the top of the building, a glass lantern and dormers act as observation points giving spectacular views across Oxford. The quads’ public spaces are represented by a two-storey stone clad ‘base’, carved into and elaborated with stairs, voids and a ‘suspended room’ where it is revealed in the Learning Commons. This stone base houses the main academic facilities and service spaces: teaching rooms, archive, music practice room, porter’s lodge and ancillary spaces. The Fitzhugh Auditorium acts as a destination along the architectural narrative of this new collegiate campus. A new performance space for the College, the auditorium brings the main curved, patterned roof of the quad together with a shell roof form arching upwards from the garden wall in a surprising, lyrically expressive form. Concerts, events, lectures and dinners can be staged in this light filled but acoustically tempered and sealed environment, with the north quad acting as landscape threshold and stage for collegiate life. The over-riding concept of a ‘scholarly home’ is characterised by this all-embracing curved roof, marking the new Quad on Oxford’s skyline while providing unique loft study and living spaces. Enclosed by patterned stainless steel that folds across wall and roof surfaces, student rooms are conceived as a single large piece of furniture, with integrated desks, window seats, storage, and bathroom pods. They are arranged along naturally-lit corridors, animated by family kitchens, and terminating in a view to the outside. Fellows studies occupy the ‘loft’ spaces under the curved roof and are gathered around the Senior Common Room, which looks out onto a south-facing terrace formed by a sinuous cut made in in the curved roof form. The roof’s unique geometry and material is a unifying device between the old and new, a mediator between institutional and residential, and the all-embracing enclosure for this scholarly community. Referencing George Gilbert Scott’s latticed spire of Exeter College’s neo-Gothic Chapel, it’s patterned stainless steel folds across wall and roof surfaces - a single planar element, or ‘cloak’ cut to fit the building like the tailoring of cloth to a body. The new building’s curved roof form, its construction technique and patterned metal tiling draws on the Arts and Crafts tradition of William Morris, a graduate of Exeter College, and the ethos of his tutor, John Ruskin. Long term cost-effective sustainable design principles included natural and cross ventilation, high ceilings, natural light and exposed structural finishes to enable optimal performance. Our simple ‘fabric first’ approach provided a super insulated high-performance envelope, while careful detailing garners high levels of air tightness and minimal heat loss through thermal bridging. Using thermal mass, solar thermal panels and air-source heat pumps, the building has achieved a 20% improvement on Building Regulations standard for energy consumption.