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

Returning to the entrance, once through the glass screen you come into the box that surrounds the drum, which both draws the eye upwards to the light, and you forward into its volume before you come to the glass doors that are constrained between the porter's booth and the shop. Beyond them are the galleries. The first space houses the small but impressive permanent collection under a shallow up-lit vault. Beyond are the sliding screens that separate the permanent collection from the fragment of the loan gallery at this level.

To the right is one of the most magical moves in the building: a long stair goes down to the main loan exhibition area in the basement (a double-vaulted space with structural warm red bricks exposed on the soffits of the shallow curves). The up flights from the entrance level lead to the garden and the curators' department. The stairs rise and descend in a thin top-lit slot, which is separated from the permanent gallery by a row of white square columns, so that otherwise enclosed space is given further dimensions by the verticality of the slot and by contact with the outside world offered by constantly changing light coming from above.

The garden over the gallery is an unexpected delight. The long stair leads you up to an arcade surrounding a space modelled in miniature on the Islamic patterns of Granada's Generalife, with geometric pools and central canal surrounded by greenery that will presumably become more robust and part of the building as it matures. The curator is probably the luckiest person in the building, for the office that the holder enjoys looks out down the axis of the rill and pools to the doors of the drum that lead to the balcony, off which opens the little library.

From this level, a few steps lead down to the first floor of the teaching wing. It must be admitted that the contrast between the garden and the drum with the double-banked corridor of teaching rooms is a bit bathetic. The second floor of the wing is similar to the first - workmanlike enough, but rather dull. But the upper two floors are much better; the offices need a shallower depth than the teaching rooms below, and this has allowed a roof-lit slot to penetrate both levels bringing light to the double-banked corridors.

The rest of the story is easily told. If you had turned left instead of going straight on at the entrance drum, you would have come to the communal areas of the ground floor (cafe and seminar rooms) linked in enfilade. The lecture theatre in the basement is usually reached down a rather unceremonial dog-leg stair. But it has a foyer that echoes the geometry of the drum above, and for special occasions, it can be linked to the lower level of the loan gallery to form an impressive formal academic suite.

As a whole, the Islamic Arts Centre creates a new sense of identity in the university, and sets a standard of building and placemaking which that organisation has desperately needed for many years. P.D.