Oxford ordonnance

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1994 by Catherine Slessor

A complex and intelligent re-interpretation of the traditional Oxford College court which uses twentieth-century technology combined with a treasury of abstracted history.

In the 700-year evolution of Oxtord's college pantheon, St John's occupies a respectable middling position. Neither quite as venerable as the thirteenth-century University College, nor a nineteenth-century arriviste, St John's was founded in 1555 and dedicated to the eponymous St John the Baptist, whose statue, by Eric Gill, still stands in the inner wall of the gate. The college was originally granted two manors in Walton, (now north Oxford) but, like many others, has been obliged to extend its academic fiefdom beyond the geographical and architectural bounds of its traditional quads.

Before the opening of MacCormac Jamieson Prichard's new Garden Quadrangle, St John's most recent addition was Arup Associates' 1976 residences -- later admiringly described by Richard MacCormac as 'architecture like cabinet work with the glazing contained within the masonry structure'. Despite the passage of time, Arup's concrete and glass cabinet work still retains a sternly expressive, square-jawed allure.

The site for St John's latest foray into modern architecture, lies just to the east of the Arup complex. Defined on its north side by a totemic seventeenth-century stone wall that screens the luxuriant Fellows' Gardens (enjoyed by Dr Johnson, among others), the plot is an exceedingly cramped rectangle formerly colonised by a hotchpotch of unremarkable, albeit listed, nineteenth-century buildings. Most have been demolished, apart from one refurbished block facing on to St Giles, which acts as the reassuring public face of the new scheme, although utterly unrepresentative of the more intriguing spectacle taking place behind it.

The new building has been designed to sustain a sense of the secretive and unexpected. Like a mysterious walled garden or a cryptic maze, it reveals itself slowly, by degrees. Compared to MacCormac's earlier student residences for Worcester College (AR September 83) which were very much picturesque objects, positioned in and responding to the surrounding landscape, St John's is inward-looking, intimate and seemingly self-contained. Like the dense urban grain of Venice, it has a slightly claustrophobic quality, emphasised by the tightly clustered form that effectively excludes the outside world. The most formal entrance is through a axial aperture hewn into the garden boundary wall. This new gate is embellished by a swirling confection of wrought iron tendrils by jeweller Wendy Ramshaw, one of three artists commissioned to produce work for the new building. Yet despite its uplifting adornment, the narrowness of the gate is slightly forbidding -- as well it might be, since beyond lies an enigmatic Piranesian underworld of blind alleys, vaults and rusticated nether regions. There are even great garlands of dolorously clanking chains, intended to dispose of rainwater, but selected possibly for atmosphere rather than effectiveness.

This muscular, Roman podium houses the communal spaces, principally the tiered lecture theatre and a dining chamber, together with a kitchen and secondary service areas, organised with characteristic Oxbridge formality around a scaled down version of a quad -- in this case an open central courtyard. The perimeter of the courtyard is defined by a delicate and elaborate glass screen, designed by Alexander Beleschenko. Light is funnelled into this stygian domain through the central oculus and a pair of saucer domes (imposingly mounted on pendentives in the theatre and the dining room). Light is also introduced through the hollow keystones of the arches.

Such subtle yet dramatic interplay of light and shade is reminiscent of Soane's experiments with chiaroscuro at the Bank of England. The construction of the podium is as intriguing as its slightly tortuous form, combining both precast and in-situ cast concrete elements. The large piers and the plinth are composite structures, formed by both techniques -- initially they were precast as hollow units, then the cores filled up on site with concrete to give the structure greater solidity and continuity. A range of finishing techniques such as grit blasting and polishing is used to evoke, in the language and qualities of concrete, the textural variety of stone-built Classicism.

The buildings at upper levels are a direct contrast with the chthonic lower depths and take their inspiration from different sources, notably the trabeated structures of Schinkel and Alexander Thompson. They also bear a strong family resemblance to MacCormac's student accommodation at nearby Wadham College, although St John's is decidedly more wrought -- perhaps at times even overwrought -- in execution. At Wadham concrete is invariably cladding; at St John's it is load bearing. The towers of student residences are arranged around an elevated formal garden, complete with protruding cylindrical lanterns and a belvedere large enough to accommodate a string quartet.