Exeter College; St. Hilda College, Oxford University. From a large and sheltered roof to a small window sill, Alison Brooks’s new quadrilateral for Exeter College is a masterpiece of people-centeredness, and St. Hilda An interesting addition to the college takes full advantage of its riverfront environment

Just entered the Cohen Quad, a building designed by Alison Brooks Architects for Exeter College of Oxford University, the perspective of the wooden arches disappeared in front of you. They are flat and slender, like a series of stage planes, letting sunlight filter from the left. The archway pauses and then restarts from a distance, now made of concrete, illuminated from the right and aligned at a slightly different angle. The effect is seductive and mysterious, and the mysterious scale is a bit like Alice in Wonderland. This is an elegant rabbit hole.

The rhythm of the arches constitutes irregularities that you may not notice immediately. After the land at this particular location collapsed, the floor first sloped downward. The wooden enfilade has a subtle expansion—the arch becomes taller and wider in the middle of the sequence—and the corresponding contraction of the concrete arch. They shrink in the middle of the run. The building is playful, free and enjoyable. The building materials, volume and light, and the way they are put together are pleasant.

The purpose of the project is to expand this 700-year-old college, and its historical site in the city centre has no room for expansion. The new building half a mile away can accommodate 90 undergraduates and graduate students, an auditorium, seminar rooms and cafes, and a basement archive for college manuscripts and old books. Cohen Quad is a self-sufficient satellite-where students can live, eat, socialize and study-and it is close enough to the ancient mothership so that they can easily walk from one place to another.

It is located on a site formerly occupied by Ruskin College, which has been relocated elsewhere, and its only fairly good 1913 appearance and part of its side walls have been preserved. If this is the strategy beloved by cynical developers-preserving historical skins and other parts-the results here prove to be reasonable, making room for a generous and open building that manages to get a lot from a limited amount volume. It realizes a rich internal personality: expansive or intimate places, looking inward or outward, high, low, bright, dark, natural or machine-made materials, carving, hollowing out, assembling, connecting, welding. Brooks, an architect known for award-winning housing projects in Cambridge, Harlow and London's Brent District, said the idea is to "pull students out of their rooms" and "let them choose where to work" And make "every space becomes a different gathering space".

What you notice most outside is a huge scaly roof, covered with diamond-shaped stainless steel, its angles are round, and it wraps around the walls. Its purpose is to make this building feel like a big house, surrounded and sheltered, playing repeatedly on the eventful skyline of Oxford University, and also refers to the style of art and crafts inspired by William Morris who studied at the university The decoration. The roof is also a bit dragon-shaped, which may please JRR Tolkien, another Exeter alumnus.

Otherwise, the exterior is covered with pale and solemn stones, which are found in cities. Two U-shaped courts are formed, each open on one side, and is considered a less introverted version of the traditional Oxford quadrilateral. One faces the gardens of the neighboring Worcester College, and the other faces a domestic-scale street along the side of the Cohen Quad site.

The wooden arcade runs along one side of one of the courts, and the other side is concrete. Together they form a central spine through which you can reach the main functions of the building. In the center, at the pause between the two arcades, is a "learning sharing space", an open, multi-level area where students can sit holding laptops or playing mobile phones, chatting or staring out of the window or doing Anything that helps their intellectual gears turn.

The buildings in the auditorium are the most lively, this is a place of sliding, lightness and charm. It has a two-half vault, a low spherical part suspended from a high raised part against gravity, and they all form a free-form wood Gothic consisting of wooden pillars and ribs. The student’s room is calm, made of durable materials such as cherry wood and concrete, and has an additional small window that can project daylight onto the built-in desk. The researcher room on the top floor has a high curved ceiling, following the shape of a dragon roof.

Whether it's under the roof, on the ground, or hollowed out on the earth, the design can help you feel where you are, and constantly allow you to see the simple terraces and magnificent institutions around you. It also keeps you informed of the quadrilaterals, cloisters and stone walls of old Oxford in modern buildings.

The Cohen Quad is not all perfect: something terrible has happened to the wall of the adjacent garden, it looks like a cheap wooden fence, and some of its multiple forms and materials meet better than others. It has also gone through a bumpy journey: most of it was completed four years ago, but with the outbreak of the pandemic, there were some problems with the building, which means it can only be fully understood now. But it is difficult to see such an imaginative and thoughtful building at the same time. The idea of ​​how people live and work together shapes everything from the big roof to the small desktop window.

Another anniversary building of St. Hilda College, Oxford University also inherited the tradition. Here, our idea is to make the most of an asset-the dean and verdant frontage of the Cherver River-and at the same time make up for a weak point, the unifying and scattered existing buildings. Therefore, architects Jay Goth and Fiona Scott, like Brooks, have some well-thought-out residential projects. They designed a long crank block that echoes the twists and turns of the river and adds An entrance tower with a crown top. They created a pavilion by the water for holding events and lectures, and its glass wall allows you to enjoy the view. The newly replanted landscape extends between the buildings.

Like Cohen Quad, the Anniversary Building utilizes historical and architectural materials while providing facilities such as student rooms, public rooms, and teaching and functional spaces. The concept here is that the old form of the courtyard has been unfolded so that you can get a riverside garden instead of a traditional fence, while still being a sheltered and reflective place. The long piece of ordinary brickwork becomes scalloped and frilled at the top so that it can capture light and shadow well. From time to time, metal products burst out with patterns of oak leaves. The Cohen Quad is not exactly a brilliant masterpiece—the interior is the more familiar white gypsum board—but it is still a well thought out and civilized design.

All of this makes me hope that there are more such jobs outside of the privileged enclaves of Oxford. Respected institutions like Exeter College can attract funds from venture capitalists and philanthropists such as Ronald Cohen, which certainly helps, but it's not just about money. Alison Brooks argued that the building she designed was not too expensive to build about 6,000 square meters of accommodation at a construction cost of 30 million pounds. She said that what is more important is the lack of a corporate mentality that thinks educational places should be built like office buildings.

Debugging in Oxford may have a lot to do with self-confidence and the feeling of keeping up with the past. However, there is no fundamental reason why the qualities of buildings such as the Coen Courtyard and Anniversary Building cannot be used more widely. At the same time, they should enjoy what they have achieved.