The Bartlett School of Architecture\

Wates House (now known as 22 Gordon Street) was a tired and uninspiring building. However this has never prevented the Bartlett consistently providing the highest quality teaching and research. The School, however, had become a victim of its own success, and coupled with the poor condition of the building, was in chronic need of additional and improved space specifically adapted to its unique pedagogy.

Key drivers were the creation of a building that reflects the quality of the school’s teaching and research, whilst also making a positive contribution to the surrounding conservation area.

Our design doubles the amount of teaching and research space available to the school’s students and staff, while retaining the building’s existing structure.

The entire building has been reconfigured to include significantly more studios and breakout space, encouraging collaboration across the school. Central to the design philosophy is opening up the façade of the building to reveal the activity within. This has been achieved by placing formal and informal exhibition spaces at ground floor level, inserting a new staircase to open up the building’s circulation, re-orientating the entrance and expressing key spaces to give strategic views of London.

The design also includes an extension to provide enhanced foyer and café space, exhibition space, state of the art workshop facilities and full internal remodelling to provide a variety of teaching and research spaces including seminar rooms, studios, crit spaces, computer clusters and academic and administrative offices.

One of the positive aspects of the original Wates House was that it provided an anonymously robust canvas for the creativity within. Rather than design a pristine new environment that could restrict the school’s teaching and research our interior design approach celebrates the rawness of the original structure and reveals it for all to see. New elements of the building have been treated distinctly from the original to provide a clear narrative on the building’s evolution. Robustness, tactility and human experience have informed the internal palette of exposed and coordinated concrete and services complemented with bespoke joinery and accent furniture.

Expanding the area of the original Wates House by over 50% was a major challenge, particularly as the building straddles two distinct sub-areas of the Bloomsbury Conservation Area and in the vicinity of several listed buildings. Through working collaboratively with key stakeholders, including academics from the school, local authority planning, design and conservation officers, and local amenity groups we developed a contextually-sensitive and timeless design. Our designs have been carefully considered to respond to the surrounding, and emerging context in a contemporary manner to contribute positively to the setting of the Conservation Area.

Read The Bartlett Case Study