Hare's breadth - new Islamic Arts Center in the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies

Architectural Review, The, June, 1996 by Peter Davey

A new centre for studying Islamic art adds greatly to both the academic power of London's School of Oriental and African Studies and the quality of the university campus.

The new Islamic Arts Centre for London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) is a good deal more complicated than it appears to be. The building has five or six primary functions contained within the rather non-committal exterior: the long block that runs along the north-west side of the site parallel to the main SOAS building contains a 300 seat lecture theatre in the basement, a floor of informal social and academic spaces at entrance level, then two floors of seminar rooms, above which are a couple more levels of offices for the academic staff. The wing that runs at right-angles to this one contains the galleries, with the permanent collection on the ground floor and the loan gallery occupying part of this level and the basement. Above the galleries are the offices and workshops of the curators disposed round an Islamic garden. At the joint which connects the two limbs is the entrance hall, a large tall square balconied volume crowned by a drum containing an inverse oculus (the centre is opaque and surrounded by a generous ring of glass).

The centre takes the note for its outer walls from the immediately adjacent terrace that forms the end of the south-west side of Russell Square, the place which stopped the southwards destructive march of London University into the fragile Georgian fabric of Bloomsbury. The site was vacant for many years, and when Nicholas Hare was asked to make the new building, the university's priorities had changed to such an extent that retention and completion of the terrace was one of the prime intentions of the design. There had been a gap site at the end of the terrace since it was bombed during the War. The new building's presence will normally first be noticed by most people here, where its short side butts up against the Georgian houses. The new building is made in soft pink brick which contrasts with the buff stocks of the old buildings but is very similar to the facing bricks of the SOAS building itself and to those of 30 Russsell Square at the other end of the terrace, which as Hare remarks, becomes contained between two symmetrical pink book-ends, each of rather larger scale than the Georgian houses.

Hare takes some of his key regulating lines from the terrace: window head heights and the cornice. (To ensure that the latter retains continuity, the top storey of the new building is drawn back from the brick facade and made almost neutral by continuous glazing under a wafer-thin flat roof.) But while the building is sympathetic to its neighbours, there is no attempt to ape them or make a neo-Georgian facade. For one thing this is an educational establishment and not a house, so that the windows have been made bigger than the neighbouring domestic ones to ensure an egalitarian distribution of daylight in the interior (charming as Georgian proportions and solid-to-void ratios are, they do not generate a very even flow of light). And the method of using bricks is quite different, with solid Flemish-bonded piers rising the full height of the building. Between them, the window openings are made with massive, almost Roman, flatbrick arches over lead-clad stainless-steel frames that have hardwood opening lights. When the building turns the corner to face SOAS, the constructional system carries on, with the piers spaced rather further apart, generating an early-nineteenth century industrial feel. (I do not mean this in a derogatory way: it has some of the noble, urbane pragmatism of Schinkel's sadly lost Berlin Bauschule, which itself took so much from the mills of the British Industrial Revolution.)

The teaching accommodation ends at the caesura of the recessed full-height lead-on-stainless-steel glazing of the main stair which separates the wing from the honorific scale of the entrance. The height of the inner volume is expressed outside and the drum can be seen emerging from the square brick block which contains it. The glass entrance screen is reached up a shallow flight of steps. Two round columns of reconstructed stone prop a lintel in the same material, making a shallow porch which addresses the entrance of SOAS across what Hare calls the 'precinct'. This is a real triumph for the architect, who has persuaded the university to convert what was a tatty bit of tarmac car park into an agreeable paved tree-lined walk that gives the SOAS complex a feeling of continuity, and the university (too often Gradgrindian when it thinks no-one is looking) a much-needed sense of urbanity and continuity with the surrounding Georgian fabric. The final public face of the Islamic Arts Centre fronts the tree-shaded lawn contained by the northern part of Charles Holden's '30s Senate House. There is a possibility that this building may one day be extended to enclose the lawn as an internal court. If this happens, Hare's centre will face the back of the new building across a narrow walk, so partly for this reason, he has made the gallery wing virtually blank on this side, with openings only at the upper level to illuminate the curators' premises and give views out from the secret garden.