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Architects love to talk about the public. They describe how their buildings will welcome people in, how their designs will engender shared life and understanding, how they will be permeable, accessible and vibrant, and they like devices by which the notion of public-ness is translated into architectural form. Brutalists used to call the elevated walkways of their housing projects “streets in the sky”. From the 1970s onwards, corporate architects tried to demonstrate their public spirit by putting glass-roofed “atria” in the heart of their developments. There’s currently a worldwide enthusiasm for an idea that has been around for a while, that of putting an arc or a bank of stepped seating in a place and calling it (not quite accurately) an “amphitheatre”.
None of this is surprising. Architects are mostly well-intentioned and optimistic people who want to do good in the world. To offer themselves as guardians of public life also gives them a role. Their professional status being nebulous, given that it’s possible to build a building without them, it helps if they can offer a better justification than: “This is what I like so suck it up.” Or: “This is what my reclusive, misanthropic offshore billionaire client likes so suck it up.”
The tricky part is to tell rhetoric from reality. Just saying that something is public doesn’t necessarily make it so. People are quite capable of forming crowds and connecting with one another without help from design professionals, and are sometimes resistant to do so in the places indicated. A piazza, atrium or street-in-the-sky can be the sign of an intention rather than its fulfilment. (Which might explain the misuse of “amphitheatre”, a word that properly describes a full 360 degrees of seating. In classical architecture a semi-circle makes a “theatre”, a word that creates the expectation of activity that a developer or architect may not actually be able to provide.)
Kingston University’s new Town House stands or falls on its ability to be in some way public. It is the first building on the British mainland designed by Grafton Architects, the Dublin-based practice who next month will formally receive the RIBA gold medal for architecture, who curated the 2018 Venice biennale, and whose cliff-like university building in Lima, Peru, won RIBA’s international prize in 2016. The hope, says Yvonne Farrell, who with Shelley McNamara founded Grafton, is to create is to create “a social spiral” rising up the building, to allow the “kind of abrasion” of different people doing different things, which “is what a university is”. Six generous storeys in height, its light-catching concrete frame crowning a slight rise in a busy road, it is amply furnished with the architecture of sociability.
The basic brief was to provide a library and rehearsal and performance facilities for the university’s dance courses. The building also has to do more: the ambition is to create a three-dimensional campus for an institution that, having grown from a polytechnic and before that a technical college, doesn’t have the greenswards and masonry of an ancient university. It is, rather, a collection of more or less functional buildings scattered across a corner of outer London. While it does have some history (Hampton Court Palace is just across the Thames), it also bears the scars of 20th-century arterial roads.
The university’s vice-chancellor, Steven Spier, says that half the students at Kingston are the first in their family to attend university. “University is about moving you into a new space. It should make students feel good about themselves. Architecture’s a part of that. The value that you put in contemporary work means that you have a belief in the future.” As with all competitors in the now intense market of higher education, the new building is doubtless also about raising Kingston’s marketing profile, but that’s not a point Spier stresses. Refreshingly, it has needed nothing – the university’s funds apparently being sufficient on their own – from a munificent donor. There has been no requirement to call it the Oleg Garch Centre for Peace and Humanity.
It is also an open question what a modern library is. If printed books still play their part – and there are specific requirements (in this case) for storing archives of Iris Murdoch and the locally born photographer Eadweard Muybridge – for much of the time a library simply serves as the best place to lay your laptop. The things that might make it better include acoustics, lighting, space, wifi, affordable coffee and the comradely, but not distracting, presence of other people. The stakes are high: if the students don’t show up, the building loses a lot of its point.
The Town House is therefore a series of mostly open-plan platforms for study and generally being there, plus the defined spaces for archive and dance. A big stair connects everything, rising through the front part of the building. There is an expansive ground floor, containing a dance theatre, a cafe and, indeed, an “amphitheatre”. This is a place where actual lectures and performances can take place, but when not in use sliding walls move away so that the banks of seating are left standing within the larger ground floor space, “like a Roman ruin”, says Farrell. They can be inhabited informally by whoever wants to do so.
The ceiling above these banks of seats is high, allowing views through glazed walls into the library levels and the corridors around the dance rehearsal rooms, part of a generalised pattern of looking up and looking across that runs through the building. The whole is then wrapped in an ample outer layer of balconies, terraces and external stairs – which also provide the means of escape from fires – on to which the population of the building can spread. From the top you can glimpse the Thames and see Hampton Court. “We want to make people aware of where they are on the planet,” says Farrell.
Spier says that the Town House, whose name suggests a wish to be somehow civic, should “invite the community in”. Anyone is welcome to come in, ascend the building and enjoy its cafes. Grafton have “blurred the threshold” between the university’s territory and the public pavement, with the outer layer acting as a sort of portico that both filters passers-by into the building and acts as a buffer between the interior and the busy road. It steps forward to announce itself, back to accommodate some pre-existing trees. The first flight of the big staircase greets you on entry through the front door, encouraging you to ascend. There are also other, more incidental ways to get in and out.
All of which would be no more than a schedule of good intentions, if the execution didn’t enable them to be fulfilled. What Grafton has done is to set all the hoped-for activity in a building whose bony structure is robust and plain enough, but also tuned and considered. The architects have set up rhythms of repeating and vertical lines, of beams, steps, slats and balustrades. There are details that might seem unimportant, such as a slight stepping out in the frame at the front, which contributes to your awareness that this a constructed thing, not a kit unpacked from a box. The stair changes direction in its upper flights, not because it has to, but to make the ascent more of an adventure.
The structure imparts a sense of care and thought. It has a town hall’s sobriety that allows the playfulness of what is a great grownup climbing frame to flourish. Its underlying consistency allows for wide registers of intimate and grand, quiet and busy, light and dark, regular and eccentric. The directness of the materials brings the building, whose outsize proportions tend towards grandeur, down to earth. The construction tells you that this is something made by work, which makes it good place in which to work.
One or two things don’t feel right. The building would possibly be better if it had fewer empty frames; the flights of stairs, probably due to constructional expediency, are made of multiple concrete components when they would surely prefer to be of a single piece each. Some (not me) might find Grafton’s style too austere. But the early signs are that the building is working exactly as it should. It is flooded with people who already seem at home there, studying, meeting, wandering, looking, at ease with themselves and with one another. It is, in fact, a public building.
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