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Location: RVC Camden Campus, London
Client: Royal Veterinary College
Value: £1.6m
Status: Completed 2010
RVC Camden Cafe
Located in a conservation area, and on a tight urban site offering limited opportunities for expansion, our proposals aimed to maximise investment by delivering additional accommodation at the heart of the campus without the need for demolition and replacement of any existing buildings.
The brief was to investigate opportunities for a new social space within the existing Hobday building on the RVC’s Camden Campus. Typical of many large institutions, the challenge faced was how to meet the requirements of 21st Century university education and research within the confines of a 20th Century building.
The resulting conversion has cleverly transformed a redundant lightwell into a vibrant social learning environment, allowing students and staff to meet in an atmosphere more akin to a city square than an academic institution.
The new space also allows for the expansion of surrounding facilities. A new café servery complements and enhances the existing refectory while a striking timber ‘pod’, elevated at the heart of the courtyard, provides an annex for the adjacent library. Accessible via a first floor link bridge, the pod provides a flexible, semi-public reading room and dramatic focus at the centre of the space.
The aesthetic approach and budget constraints determined a ‘light-touch’ conversion. A new ETFE roof canopy encloses the courtyard at the highest level to ensure the maximum natural light is drawn into the courtyard below. With legacy maintenance upgrades to the existing elevations, and a palette of self-finished materials, this thermally-enclosed atrium retains the ambience, light and acoustics of an outdoor environment.
New displays of the College’s collections including large animal skeletons bring the life and purpose of research to the fore; self-finished materials and delicate museum installations help to create the unique character of this exciting project. The courtyard floor has been remodelled with polished screed terraces, to connect the varying adjacent levels and create generous zones for café seating and informal gathering. A new platform lift mediates between the new and existing to provide step-free access throughout.
Project Team
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