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Geography lesson: this addition to a historic institution responds sensitively to context and landscape

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2004

Site of the infamous (and now unlikely to be built) Libeskind Spiral, London's Exhibition Road has been the focus of a long-running debate about the appropriateness of bold new architecture in sensitive historic contexts. Sweeping down from Hyde Park, it boasts an array of heavyweight Victorian institutions (the V & A, Science Museum and Imperial College), all trying to reinvent themselves for the new century. At its north end a simple pavilion of brick and glass signposts Studio Downie's new extension to the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), emblematic of the dust being gently blown off one of Britain's most venerable institutions.

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Founded in 1830, the RGS is a club for the globally intrepid, with explorers, naturalists and military strategists among its members. Its geographical collection is the world's largest and encompasses over two million items--from maps to Darwin's sextant. Since 1913 it has been housed in the comfortable confines of Lowther Lodge, a handsome Norman Shaw villa overlooking Hyde Park to the north and a walled garden to the south. In 1930 a lecture hall was added at the corner of Kensington Gore and Exhibition Road. Storage problems and limited public access prompted the society to embark on this latest addition, consolidating its relationship with Studio Downie, who had earlier been commissioned to remodel and refurbish the original lecture theatre.

The new parts house a reading room and an exhibition space, which are treated in very different ways. The exhibition space is a lightweight pavilion floating along the edge of Exhibition Road, marking a new public entrance; by contrast the reading room is dug into the courtyard garden and is a virtually imperceptible, bunkered, subterranean presence. The two parts are linked by a helical stair that sweeps down in a supple curve from the new entrance hall that anchors the north edge of the exhibition space. The long volume of the entrance resembles a telescope, with a tall glazed aperture framing a glimpse of the Royal Albert Hall on the far west side of the RGS. An umbilical corridor leads through from the entrance hall connecting the new pavilion with the lecture hall and Lowther Lodge.

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Bookended by planes of handmade red brick and crowned by a hovering roof of silvered copper, the pavilion houses a large exhibition space, overlooking the formerly secret garden. On the Exhibition Road side, a 20m-long glass wall incorporating images from the society's collection forms a visually permeable boundary. Openness--both physical and institutional--is a key aspect of the scheme. The public has access to the new L-shaped reading room, a cool underground cave tucked under the pavilion and the existing extended terrace adjoining Lowther Lodge. A continuous slot of angled glazing running around the perimeter admits light and offers contemplative views out over the garden. The relationship between a new glazed volume, Victorian brick buildings and garden quad irresistibly recalls ABK's Keble College (AR December 1977), but here a lush flowering vine is trained around the glazing to create a light and heat-diffusing green screen, which merges the building more intimately with the landscape. Increased storage space for the society's precious archive is also housed below ground.

A model of thoughtfulness and elegant understatement, Studio Downie's scheme is also highly ecologically aware, maximising the use of daylight and natural ventilation and minimising energy consumption by employing thermal mass in the basement and in the pavilion's concrete roof. Specially built furniture, such as the reception desks in the entrance hall and reading room and glass display screens in the exhibition space, adds to the sense of things being done properly and well, despite the constraints of history, context, site and public opinion. All told, an object lesson in modern urban etiquette. C.S.

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