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A carved stone pangolin clings to the top of the tower, its scaly tail curled into the crevice of a cornice, as if holding on for dear life. It crowns an arresting arrival to Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, the anteater taking its place on this skyline of slender steeples and gurning gargoyles, up there at the summit of the newest – and strangest – spire of them all.
“I was thinking, ‘How do you mark Covid in a building?’” says David Kohn, architect of this curious addition to the campus of New College. “We were developing the designs in the middle of the pandemic, when pangolins had been in the limelight for all the wrong reasons.”
Near the pangolin, at the top of this striped stone campanile, cling other carved fauna. There’s an octopus, a moth and a golden mole, joining a menagerie of creatures peering from the parapets below, all representing species at risk. “Carvings of animals on buildings used to represent colonial expansion and the novelty of discovery,” says Kohn. “Now, those same animals and territories are under huge pressure.”
Climate breakdown and planetary extinction are just two of the many themes threaded through the design of the Gradel Quadrangles, a £72m complex of student bedrooms, study space and an auditorium, along with classrooms, an assembly hall and canteen for the adjoining prep school. It is one of the most unusual additions to Oxford’s historic cityscape in living memory, a project as densely packed with meaning and allusion as the medieval quadrangle down the road, where New College first began in the 1300s.
Curving its way between a trio of existing Edwardian villas, on a leafy site at the fringes of suburban north Oxford, the student flats are a sinuous stone snake of a thing. The curvaceous horseshoe-shaped block wraps around mature trees, framing three new quads, topped with an undulating roof of metal tiles. The eaves billow and bulge as they writhe across the site, culminating in a jaunty arched gatehouse, where the fluted tower rises 21 metres to a curlicued crown. With its rhubarb and custard-coloured stonework, laid in harlequin diamond patterns, its bulbous roof of polygonal scales, and rows of carved creatures, it is a fruity eyeful to behold.
“It has been a bit of a Marmite building,” admits the warden of New College, Miles Young, a former ad man who used to head up the global branding giant, Ogilvy and Mather. He is sitting in his panelled study, where carved devils stare down from the ceiling, and stone gargoyles leer from the chapel outside. “When people first saw it, they couldn’t describe it. And if people can’t describe something, they become very uncomfortable.”
I ask Kohn how he would describe his building. Pangolin postmodern? Serpentine baroque? “I’m interested in architecture that is open to interpretation and can tell many stories,” he says. Along with tales of pangolins and the pandemic, he talks of how a window at the top of the tower is shaped like proscenium curtains being drawn back, to frame views over the city. Other diamond-shaped windows allude to Melnikov House in Moscow, a seminal project of the Soviet avant garde.
He refers to an essay by Nikolaus Pevsner, written in the 1960s, on “picturesque planning”, in which the historian uses Oxford to illustrate how buildings can animate the streetscape, providing moments of surprise and delight. “It’s a scenographic approach, playing with distance, middle and foreground,” he says. “There’s a sense of theatre to it all.”
Kohn was a brave choice for the 646-year-old New College. At the time of the design competition in 2015 – when he was pitted against the likes of Japanese star Kengo Kuma and several established British firms – he had barely built a thing. In the years since, he has carved out a niche as one of the more distinctive voices in the often beige British architecture scene, revelling in the use of colour, ornament and fun.
His studios for the Greenwich design district are a PoMo riot of green glazing bars, plump brick columns and recessed niches for statues. His Red House in rural Dorset won the RIBA house of the year in 2022, praised for its “playful eccentricity”. For some, it’s all too outre, veering beyond the bounds of good taste, but the world is better off for his wit.
At New College, previous attempts to develop the site had hit the buffers of decorum. There had been a pompously inflated plan in the 1990s, drawn up by one of King Charles’s favourites, Léon Krier. “It looked as if it came out of Nuremberg in the 1930s,” says Young. “We wanted something original, not pastiche.” He cites what he calls “the only two really original buildings in Oxford” – namely Edwin Lutyens’ Campion Hall and William Butterfield’s Keble college. “They are striking intrusions, without being disrespectful. We hope we have now added a third.”
Historic England certainly thinks so. In a rare moment of enthusiasm for novelty, its officers declared that Kohn’s design would “bring joy to all those who experienced it”. Oxford’s design review panel even encouraged the architect to make his tower taller, adding to the rhythm created by those of Harris Manchester and Mansfield colleges along the street.
Clinching the competition, Kohn flatteringly drew on New College’s history of “firsts” in his proposal. The venerable institution lays claim to the first purpose-built quad, conceived by its founder William of Wykeham in 1379, a fortified monastic block, its crenelated parapet marking a firm boundary between town and gown. It also boasts the first open-sided courtyard, Garden Quad, finished in 1708 by William Byrd.
“I became fascinated by the glacial pace of how the college evolves,” says Kohn. “They build a big project every couple of hundred years, and each phase represents a kind of opening up to the city, gradually embracing the outside world.” His contribution to the half millennium of innovation? Oxford’s first ever curved quad – and the first to channel Tolkien and Gaudí.
Entering through the jaunty arched gateway of the porters’ lodge, shaped like a Japanese moon bridge, you find yourself in a world that has the cartoonish, fairytale air of a Miyazaki film. Everything is chubby and a bit oversized, with huge picture windows drifting unevenly across the facades, and mansards and portholes poking through the eaves. Inside, spiral staircases lead to curved corridors of en suite bedrooms and big shared kitchens. The top floor rooms enjoy mezzanine bed platforms, housed beneath the rollercoaster roofline, while ceilings sprayed with fluffy acoustic insulation add to the hallucinatory sense that you might have been swallowed into the belly of a cuddly toy.
The students seem delighted with their weird new digs, praising the bright shared study space downstairs and the performance venue buried in the basement. Another sweeping staircase leads to an underground domed rotunda, illuminated by a dangling halo of lights, where mustard yellow walls frame the entrance to a recital hall. The 105-seat auditorium, designed with theatre experts Charcoalblue, is lined with crenelated wooden panelling, another playful allusion to the medieval quad.
Facilities for the adjoining prep school are equally theatrical, with an assembly hall housed in the bulging roof, where the soffit plunges down towards the stage, as if struck by an asteroid. It is fittingly built on the site of the hall where Tolkien first permitted the Hobbit to be performed as a musical in the 1960s, perhaps explaining why the whole place has echoes of Middle-earth. Was that a student, or Bilbo Baggins, peeping from a porthole?
If the project has a weakness, it is that the stagey formal gestures sometimes trump functionality. The tower makes a striking marker for the college, and it provides a distinctive home for the Gradel Institute of Charity, named, like the quadrangles, after the alumnus-donor hedge fund manager, Chris Gradel. But inside, it turns out to be a bit of a folly, housing a single small office per floor, with the rest of the trefoil-shaped plan taken up by a staircase and lift.
The quality of the stonework – by Grants of Shoreditch in London, with carvings by Fergus Wessel – is impeccable. But the interiors betray the design-and-build nature of the construction contract, with clunky handrails and odd junctions giving off a cheaper air than you would expect from the budget. The roof is also clumsy: its reptilian metal plates shimmer from a distance but, up close, they meet at odd angles with yawning gaps, greeting the parapet in ragged rows, like broken teeth. The jarring look of Gaudí-by-algorithm is the result of a design change during construction, when the planned concrete roof was switched to a timber structure – an admirable carbon-saving effort, but one that came with unintended consequences.
Still, in the long term, these are small niggles for a project that should otherwise stand the test of time. It is a gutsy contribution to the college that gleefully pushes the limits of its founder’s motto: “Manners makyth man.”
