Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates - Mixed-Use Development - Oxford University
Date: 20 Aug 2002
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) has recently won its second contract at historic Oxford University in England for a dormitory, seminar rooms, and a lecture hall at St. Anne's College. The four-story, 40,000-square-foot building will provide space for teaching and student accommodation at the heart of the north Oxford campus.
KPF's winning design is sympathetic to the older buildings near the university site without imitating them. The new building responds to the scale of the Victorian villas to the north, and its cornices are aligned with that of is southern neighbor, the 1937 Hartwell House designed by Giles Gilbert Scott.
The teaching space, seminar rooms and lecture theatre are organized at the base of the building facing the new garden court. A double height foyer space serving these rooms is top lit from a tall clerestory window facing the entrance courtyard. The 110 student rooms are organized into 6 traditional Oxford "staircases" with each set of stairs accessible via a bridge across the foyer space. Planned to maximize a sense of openness and light, the student rooms feature a small glazed balcony.
Like the Rothermere American Institute, KPF¹s first Oxford project, this structure is designed to be energy-efficient. An air-distribution system heats and cools the ground floors, using ground water and a heat-recovery system. The classrooms and lecture rooms on the ground floor are conditioned by using air cooled by the water in the newly created gardens.
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates operates globally, bringing an informed perspective to local issues and fulfilling the unique functional, aesthetic and social goals of each project. KPF is driven by design intent, not a predetermined design style, and strives to create structures that are intimately connected to function and context. The result achieves a degree of craft and detail that elevates them to the highest level of both beauty and practicality.
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