Russell Street Hostel, St. Catharine s College

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1 Russell Street Hostel, St. Catharine s College Client: St. Catharine s College, Cambridge University Value: 2.8m Collaborators: Michael Hadi Associates, Max Fordham, Davis Langdon, Qube This project adds twenty two residential units for graduates and two fellows flats to an existing college site in central Cambridge. The insertion re-structures the planning of the site to make sense of the earlier development, which was both unresponsive to its garden setting and the potential of the site. The restricted nature of the backland lot necessitated a carefully considered response that maintains the privacy and amenity of the surrounding properties and re-focuses all of the accommodation, both new and existing, around a new shared and enclosed garden. The superstructure of the building is an innovative and highly sustainable solid-wood timber system - whose rapid on-site construction offered significant programme benefits. The timber is selectively exposed as an internal wall finish, lending the bedrooms and circulation spaces a particular material quality. The project was awarded an RIBA Spirit of Ingenuity Residential Design Award in 2010 and was a finalist for the Best Small Housing Project in the LABC Building Excellence Awards 2010.

2 Above Looking across the new courtyard from the existing building Above Right A slot rooflight drops light into one of the generous shared kitchens The project establishes a new courtyard, with one edge formed by the existing building, around which the bedrooms are oriented. Two small-scale wings single storey buildings with roof-top lanterns negotiate the delicate relationship to surrounding properties. Key 1 Existing hostel building 2 Combined entrance 3 Car parking 4 Main, 2 storey block over undercroft 5 Court garden 6 Set-back rooftop lanterns 7 Roof to ground floor rooms 5th Studio s project represents the best of Peter Smithson s undervalued tradition of good ordinariness. Working within the constraints of a poor, but functioning, 1990s building, the practice has crafted the ordinary with delight... 5th Studio has tackled a difficult problem and made the result look effortless. Keith Bradley, Architect s Journal

3 Above The building uses laminated solid timber panels for its super-structure. The panels are pre-fabricated, enabling rapid assembly on-site. Right/Top Exposed timber structure forms the setting for a study area within the upper level of a duplex bedroom unit.

4 Right Screen-like elevation to the car park. Slatted timber cladding is extended across the windows along the ciculation corridors, giving these normally mundane spaces a particular spatial quality (above). Below Forming a cloister to the courtyard.

5 Good Ordinariness 5th Studio has tackled a difficult problem and made the result look effortless, writes Keith Bradley Press This building mediates between the outside world of the city and that of the rarefied interior world of the collegiate court. The outer wall is clad as a screen of larch timber, signalling the softer interior, and the inside brickwork face makes reference to the outside. This playful reversal makes a Janus building that forms the connection with the 1990s building and its formal street entrance. Internally, graduate rooms face on to the courtyard, accessed via a single-sided corridor behind the timber and glass privacy screen. On the upper level there are two fellows penthouse duplex apartments that open out on to a shared roof terrace. Peter Smithson often referred to the art of good ordinariness in architecture. 5th Studio s 22 graduate study rooms and two fellows apartments, added to an existing off-college site in Cambridge, represent the best of Smithson s undervalued tradition of ordinariness. Working within the constraints of a poor, but functioning, 1990s building, the practice has crafted the ordinary with delight. The existing building created an awkward and restricted backland plot. This necessitated a careful response to maintain the privacy of the surrounding properties, and 5th Studio s carefully planned new building re-focuses every room in the development around a shared collegiate garden court. The manipulation of its section to create split-level rooms, with the use of borrowed light, allows the building to be right on the site boundary, maximising the perimeter and area of the courtyard garden. The design was an exercise in privacy and community, in terms of both the relationship of the shared life of the hostel and that of the surrounding residential properties. The ground plan creates two new external spaces to the rear of the existing building. The first is an anti-space, forming an open courtyard as a secondary entrance alongside the back garden walls of the adjoining properties. A four-storey wing, perpendicular to the existing building, forms a colonnaded undercroft space, which links to the second, inner-courtyard garden space. The inner courtyard is made up of 22 study rooms, relatively small by Cambridge standards, organised in groups of five around kitchen/living rooms. This arrangement hugs the irregular boundary on two sides with a single-storey larch and glass screen cloister corridor overlooking the court. The lowerlevel bed spaces and upper-storey study pop-ups are clad in pre-weathered stainless steel. The embedded cave bed spaces are lit only by rooflight, with the upper-level nest workspaces looking out over the landscaped roofs and courtyard below. This inventive manipulation of the rooms, and the changing of the cloister and courtyard levels, is the resounding thesis of this project. In order to meet the requirements of the client s programme, which was determined by the academic year cycle, this project was planned around a prefabricated crosslaminated timber panel structure, manipulated to exploit the acoustic and fire-resistance qualities of the construction and allow the timber walls and soffits to be exposed in each space. The relatively slender structural profiles of the floor, roof and wall panels (being without downstand beams or ribbed structures) maximises the usable volume of the new building. The speed of assembly allowed the four-storey superstructure to be completed within four weeks on site. The construction is highly sustainable, using renewable materials, which, assuming the trees are replanted, is carbon neutral. High insulation levels and an appropriate windowto-wall ratio keep the heating and lighting

6 loads to a minimum. Solar-thermal panels, positioned on the upper-level roofs, are sized to provide 100 per cent of the hot water requirements for a typical summer day with full occupancy. This is a responsible building in every way. An intelligent response to a problematic, existing site, which has created a carefully crafted ensemble as a new take on the Cambridge courtyard typology. In this project, 5th Studio encapsulates the qualities of that good Smithson ordinariness and, as his contemporary Aldo van Eyck said in a 1981 commencement address: Now, if making a good building has become too difficult, the dilemma is indeed complete. But is it really all that difficult? Does it require a genius to avoid the mean and meaningless or a sage to bypass foolishness? Is there nothing between a fool and genius nobody in between to do the job nicely well? Here in Cambridge, 5th Studio has tackled a difficult problem and made the result look effortless. Architects Journal, 29 January 2010 Keith Bradley is a senior partner at Fielden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCBS) and winner of the 2008 RIBA Stirling Prize.