Hammersmith and Fulham College
Hammersmith and Fulham College
First Published in Newsletter 39, Spring 2020
Philip Boyle writes about the subject of his talk on 8 October 2019
Hammersmith and Fulham College was designed in 1973 and built a little later from 1976 to 1980. The year of completion of this ambitious educational project was two years into Margaret Thatcher’s first government; just seven years later the GLC Architects’ Department responsible for designing it would cease to exist. The work of the department’s Schools Division had a lower profile than that of its Special Works Division which produced the Grade I listed Royal Festival Hall and its Housing Division which created the Grade II* listed Roehampton Estate. Nevertheless, the Schools Division produced valuable modern architecture much of which has now gone including the Pimlico School by John Bancroft and Prebend Street Special School by Jake Brown. The former was vulnerable because of its technical problems and the latter fell foul of changes in educational policies as well as escalating land values.
This continuing distorted rise in land and residential values is currently affecting the choices of many institutions and organisations in London who have large sites. Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College run Hammersmith and Fulham College (HFC) as one of five sites and offer full and part-time further education courses there in a plethora of subjects. The organisation, which is financially challenged, is looking to maximise its estate by making as much land as possible available for cash-yielding residential projects. To do this they are looking to rebuild educational buildings, including HFC, on a smaller footprint. The Evening Standard newspaper suggests that preliminary plans (a full application has not yet been submitted to the planning department) propose to replace HFC with a seven-storey educational complex and up to 468 apartments in seven blocks on the site.
The Original Scheme
Historically the site of HFC was graced by fine educational buildings, notably St Paul’s School by Alfred Waterhouse (1884) and part of this was retained as the red brick boundary walls for the new college in 1973. The 1970s brief for HFC was for the integration of three existing educational institutions into a single building on this site to provide a wide variety of spaces for learning with good circulation and connections to transport. A new residential element was also included in the project to the north of the college.
This complex brief was a challenge and the urban site, bounded in the south by the main arterial route of the A4, tricky. The architects, led by project architect Bob Giles, looked to precedents mainly outside the UK from Europe and notably from Scandinavia. The three-dimensional organisation of the building was strongly influenced by the work of Alvar Aalto (1898- 1976) in Finland. Aalto used materials traditionally used in domestic construction such as tiles and bricks on larger scale complex briefs and he did so with great imagination and skill. An outstanding example is his small complex at Säynätsalo (1951) consisting of a town hall, library, office, retail and residential units grouped around a small square. It included a pedestrian through-route that carefully negotiated a change in level, was built primarily from red brick and achieved a very specific sense of space and wellbeing.
Here in west London, the larger complex of HFC, at around 23,000 sqm, is organised as two C-shaped smaller volumes placed back-to-back and joined at right angles by two larger blocks so as to form, and surround, an internal open square or piazza. The section is criss-crossed by circulation routes that connect the building to the wider circulation of the city. Pedestrian routes pass across the site through the piazza, like a traditional college quadrangle, at a level raised above the surrounding ground level, just like at Säynätsalo. This spatial organisation has the considerable merit of raising pedestrian access above and separating it from vehicular access.
The college was built up in section in a sort of pyramid form. At the perimeter of the building there are frequent horizontal changes of angle and step- backs in storey heights and this articulation helps to keep the scale of the spaces of this large institution reassuringly intimate both internally and externally against the boundary of the site.
The internal circulation is well daylit and ventilated from extensively glazed external walls. Aspects from inside and outside the site are enhanced by the open, planted interstitial spaces generated by the plan. The angled corridors with their windows and linear seats are refreshingly simple and provide intimate moments for small-scale interaction. At certain points there are also wonderful, life-enhancing details such as the open spiral stairs with steel balustrades connecting the two floors of the library, and the stepped floor of the small theatre space, now used as a boxing ring.
Red brick is used externally and internally to great architectural effect. The elevations are bold horizontal stripes of red semi-engineering brick balustrades alternating with stripes of brown timber-framed glazing with louvred ventilation. The same brickwork is used to finish the piazza/square, walkways and steps and is then taken into the building to create walls, steps and seats in the circulation areas. It gives a functional and hardwearing surface that when combined with the carefully sized sequences of spaces, creates an atmosphere of warm, cheerful intimacy that is clearly learnt from Säynätsalo. Whilst this red brick finish has undoubtedly been emulated in institutional buildings, here is a rare example of a large educational building on a lower budget where the brickwork has been sensitively used. Its success here seems almost unique in Britain.
The Listing Application
An application for listing HFC was submitted by the West London College Action group in the autumn of 2019 and this was turned down by Historic England (HE) who said that the building lacked “the degree of innovation in design and execution” to be listed. HE stated that the college was “derivative”, suggesting that it had little integrity in its own right. Other reasons for the decision included the repetitious treatment of the elevations and the detrimental effect that new security additions had on the building. This lack of appreciation of the quality of this complex is hugely disappointing and with an application of immunity from listing currently submitted by the college, leaves the future of the college very much in the balance.
In the application for listing, Docomomo.UK, the Twentieth Century Society and the HE assessor quoted influences and precedents we feel have impacted the design of the college. Curiously these were then used by HE as evidence of the HFC building being “derivative”. HE argued that the scheme is “misplaced” as a copy of Stirling’s red brick trilogy. These three projects – striking in form (particularly in photographs) and derivative themselves from earlier works by others – may have been influential here as they were significant Modern buildings of the 1950s to mid- 1960s for many architects practicing in the early 1970s. But they were also small and HFC is of a different scale altogether, more aligned perhaps with Aalto’s urban masterpiece the Pensions Building in Helsinki. The understanding of scale, a basic characteristic of architecture, seems to have been completely ignored in the HE response to this listing application.
Architectural discourse during the 1970s, most particularly in the post CIAM discussions, had moved on to look at the problems of larger scale projects and the relationship of buildings to both their physical and social context. There was much interest in the complex qualities and needs of growing dense conurbations. So whilst HFC might owe some if its formal and spatial language to the schemes mentioned as precedents,it was an innovative and new translation in a wholly new context. To design a piece of a city became an ambition in the 1970s and to work in the context of a large site like this was a rare opportunity.
The increasing separation of planning from architecture, the shortcomings of satellite new towns, the cancellation of Hook new town at the GLC and the strategic errors in Thamesmead were disappointments in this field. There were however three or four successes in what architect Neave Brown described as design on the scale of “a whole neighbourhood” and these include The Economist Group of buildings in St James, Westminster; The Alexandra Road Housing scheme, Camden; and The British Library on the Euston Road in Camden. All these schemes addressed their specific contexts, were innovative in design, and are now listed in recognition of their achievements. The main reason for their success was that they were all of a sufficiently large scale to create public circulation routes together with substantial urban spaces (plazas) and public realms. The buildings are animated by these routes and also by the sometimes complex arrangements of internal spaces that in turn shape the surroundings. HFC, I would argue, is strongly aligned with these projects and worthy of inclusion on this list.
Many of the subtle and beautiful shifts in planar relationships between walls and volumes at HFC are experienced as you move through and around the building but ill-managed attempts to improve security at the site have resulted in controlled access that inhibits this movement. On HE’s site visit they are therefore unlikely to have fully recognised the enjoyment of the flow of internal and external public realms of the scheme. HE specifically talks about the damaging security additions but does not seem to recognise that these are superficial and could be replaced with more efficient measures that allow the integrity of the building to be reinstated.
Repetition is mentioned by HE as another downfall of the scheme, particularly of the elevations, but repetition is an inevitable consequence of the scale and nature of this extensive educational brief and the cellular teaching spaces it provides. Repetition brings with it formal problems but it also brings the potential for formal invention and the undulating external envelope at HFC is complex and sculptural. Even if the same stripes of the minimal palette of materials snake along its lengths, the form of the building is interesting and varied, never mundane.
Hope for the future?
When HFC was completed in 1980 the architect John Partridge reviewed it in the Architect’s Journal. Having contributed earlier in his career to the high quality work realised by the LCC, and then GLC, Architects’ Department, his wise but not uncritical review made comments under a number of headings ending with “Hope for the future”. We are now in that future, and have the advantage of hindsight. This educational building has been subjected to wear and tear, changes in use and ignorant alterations and yet it stands largely intact and has the potential to continue to contribute as an educational institution. It is a unique example from its period of a large modern educational complex and a small piece of city, of which there are few examples left in the UK.
In a statement from West London College in a recent Architects’ Journal article about HFC they explain that they no longer need 50% of the space in HFC and that the new scheme will provide much needed affordable housing on the site and will “rejuvenate the neighbourhood”.The land sale will bring the college the funds to cover the costs of constructing and maintaining a new smaller building but what replaces the unique HFC is unlikely to touch it in architectural ambition or quality. It is hard to imagine that the ease of circulation, views, light and intimate moments afforded by the horizontality of the current building and its clever integration into the urban fabric will be replicated by vertically stacked towers. There are a good deal of 2-dimensional repetitive elevations that on similar recent residential tower designs. Will the volumes of the new college and residential blocks have anything like the degree of articulation that gives the current scheme such a unique human scale and experience in this urban area? Will they in fact rejuvenate the area or offer less local amenity and visual richness to the area than now?
The college also hopes that the energy efficient design of a new building will allow them to save on running and maintenance costs and reduce their overall carbon footprint. Their carbon footprint relating to running costs for a smaller, newer building will decrease, but how can you divorce that from the enormous energy that will be expended and carbon footprint embodied in a demolition and rebuild project such as this? As Bob Giles rightly asks “What credibility does the government’s green agenda have when they allow a public institution to demolish a viable building?” It seems that there is no doubt that a full refurbishment is due for this 40-year-old building but it is very likely that a sensitive retrofit scheme could resolve thermal and other issues and significantly decrease the college’s ongoing energy use. Perhaps there is also a way to reinvigorate the function of HFC by integrating another educational aspect from the five sites of the College, or even another use.
Docomomo.UK wish to appeal the HE decision not to list HFC. We are one of a chorus of groups, local residents and individuals, including Bob Giles and well-known college alumni, who are also pushing for this unique and innovative contribution to London’s Modern architecture to be recognised before it is too late. The experience of this education building, still in use for its original function and with such a particular and rare architectural quality should not be lost to future generations. HFC deserves to be listed.