Garden Building

A modest building that plays to its own humility by casting an oak and concrete framed veil around its face. A building of deliberate back and front, but none of it showy. This group of study bedrooms for the all female St Hilda’s College had to be sparing as funding from the University Grants Committee was not forthcoming and the scheme was to be built using donations. Placed away from the river and between the two existing buildings of the College, the neo-Gothic extension to Cowley Place (William Wilkinson, 1877-78) and neo-Georgian Wolfson Building (Alfred Edward Richardson, 1964), ‘with tentative physical connections to each’, the outward appearance of the Garden Building (as it came to be known) is deceptively filagree [1]. The exposed modular precast columns that carry the oak frames have no other structural function – the primary structure is a series of brick fin walls that also meet sound proofing demands between the study bedrooms. A small dressing room also acts as a buffer to noise transferred from the corridors to each room. The brick becomes a facing material to the rear and articulates the distinction between back and front. The plan takes its cues from the Smithsons’ Economist Building and is rationally simple. The central core contains vertical circulation and shared bathrooms and is separated from the living and study spaces by short corridors – a requirement of the brief. Large windows, to allow a lot of light, were given ‘a kind of yashmak’ in the form of the timber screen, which allowed climbing plants to be woven into its frame and was intended to ‘obviate any sense of insecurity’ for the inhabitants [2]. The rooms were generous and designed to allow the inhabitants some choice in the arrangement of furniture. A small trunk room to the rear of the building was demolished, but in its original form gave a sense of it having been unhinged and dropped from the rest of the mass, leaving an inset behind. There is something remarkably unremarkable about the Garden Building, its character encumbered by a logic that prevails.

[1] https://iqbalaalam.wordpress.com/2010/11/26/the-puzzle-of-smithsons-st-hida-oxford/

[2] AD, February 1971, pp.77-84