![]() ![]() The view comes as quite a surprise: an indoor-outdoor space, with so much coming and going, and yet such a relaxed atmosphere. The architect leads me up to the corridors that wrap around the top of the space, high above all those brightly coloured tables. However you choose to enter or exit the main RVC building, you end up passing through Cook's courtyard. ![]() The spot, which would be ravishing in the soft daylight even without its skeletal exhibits, certainly deserves a wider audience: no wonder Cook and his firm have been retained for the £60m redevelopment of the RVC's two campuses, this one in London, the other out in the Hertfordshire countryside. And that's exactly what it is: a place to learn in the company of fellow students and teaching staff, as opposed to being stuck in front of a laptop in a student bedsit, studying head down in the library, or taking notes in lectures."įounded in 1791, the RVC is a busy institution about 10 minutes' walk from St Pancras station if it was open to the public, this courtyard would rapidly be overrun, so public access is currently restricted (this may change) requests should be made by letter to the college. The college calls the courtyard its Social Learning Project. As you climb the stair from the cafe to the pod, there's a mezzanine used increasingly for tutorials. What we've tried to do is provide layers of space for learning, from the formal to the informal. "This is a particularly relaxed space, though – students can even come here to have a quick sleep between exams. You don't get to be a vet by drinking coffee and text-messaging all day. "It may look casual," adds Cook, "but they're working. As we speak, there are students sitting at tables and sprawling on the pod's floor. "We'd have liked a bigger elephant skeleton," says Rupert Cook, director of Architecture PLB, the Winchester and London-based practice behind the £1.5m development. As well as housing the fashionable cafe, this is also a place for study – either at the ground-floor tables, or, more thrillingly, up in the pod, which connects to the main library. Rising up through three storeys, the newly adapted courtyard acts as a thoroughfare, linking classrooms, library, lecture hall and laboratories – not to mention the RVC's collection of animal skeletons and other sliced, pickled and bottled specimens. This unexpected space has the feel of one of those compact yet incident-packed piazzas you might stumble across in a historic Italian town and yet, with its modern design, edged by brick walls and steel-framed windows, this is clearly a very contemporary cafe and square – although there's a lot more to this place than the tinkling of teacups and the guzzling of cake. This delightful spot is one of the most inspiring new squares in Britain: a spacious courtyard at the heart of the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in London.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |