Building Tour - UCL East Marshgate with Stanton Williams

Photo by Gregory Fonseca

The 2024 series of the AIA UK Chapter’s “Building Tours” continued on 30th May with a visit to UCL East Marshgate, designed by Stanton Williams, completed in 2023. Despite Stratford Station having been closed due to an incident with a train, a good audience managed to convene for a building tour led by Gavin Henderson and Ali Abbas, both from Stanton Williams.  The building is 35,000m2 of new class space within an academic building centred at the heart of UCL East, which is the largest single expansion of University College London since it’s beginnings some 200 years ago.

As you approach the building from a distance, it has a civic presence. Currently, the other four proposed buildings in the masterplan have not yet been built, lending the building to be perceived as an “object building” within the landscape.  According to Stanton Williams, Marshgate is “designed to create a collaborative and cross-disciplinary educational environment focused on finding solutions to today’s biggest social, environmental, and technological challenges, drawing on the shared knowledge and expertise of the many faculties that will converge at the new East London campus.” 

We began the tour on the south side of the building, on the site where two further buildings are planned to be constructed, where our hosts explained the project’s material considerations. The building consists of eight stories, however, the design breaks-up the mass vertically to read as four main elements - the ground-level base with three further and distinct divisions of the mass and articulation of the facades.  Our hosts explained that Marshgate is built to echo the solidity and permanence of UCL’s original Bloomsbury campus. Its massing reflects the site’s industrial past, while responding to the sculptural quality of the adjacent Olympic structures. The sculptural form of the building is crafted with in-situ and precast concrete panels with its subtly graded tones and textures appearing to grow out of the ground, reaching towards to the sky.  The facades showcase in-situ, timber board-faced concrete on the lower floors and upper levels are shaped to enhance natural daylight and ventilation while the texture of the precast elements appear to get smoother, further defining the vertical divisions of the massing. There are additional minimalist accents of Corten steel cladding that define protruding architectural elements, announcing a point of entry.

During the tour, Henderson remarked on some of the history and the dialogue held with planners, with those negotiations having led to the civic and community-oriented solution at the ground plane. This project puts inclusion, health and well-being of the general public on par of importance with private interests by allowing public use and permeability on all four sides of the building.  This ethos, in fact, is becoming increasingly a necessity in city environments by “making spaces and places in urban centres for people” within non-public buildings. The ground level includes a network of publicly accessible spaces, including a café, public art displays, and activities designed to draw community organizations, schools, and the public into the “heart” of the building.

Photo by Gregory Fonseca

The internal public space is punctuated by a central, day-lit atrium that is naturally ventilated and vertically connects all the building’s activities. Its visible circulation routes include stairs and escalators, which in the words of our hosts, were designed with the intention to create further opportunities for “random encounters”. The programmed spaces include design studios, labs, lecture theatres, fabrication workshops, media studios, exhibition areas, a library, and a professor’s lounge. There are additional spaces throughout for collaboration and engagement with local businesses and communities which form a part of the civic aspect of the design.

The palette of materials is simple which adds to the elegance of the solution and includes in-situ architectural concrete, timber and powder-coated steel.  The curation of art throughout also plays a fundamental part of the ethos and the spirit of UCL East Marshgate.  From the sculpture of the globe, hanging in the main atria space, to the variety and scale of art displayed throughout, all assist in providing a sense of place for this multi-use university building. Given Marshgate’s design, public access, multiplicity of learning environments and collaboration spaces and elegant curation, UCL East Marshgate is an exemplar of the future of higher learning and civic architecture.

The AIA UK Chapter continues to host its building tour series for the 2024 season based on Winners of AIA UK 2023 Excellence in Design Awards. The series offers architects the opportunity to visit notable buildings that have particular design interests in the UK and abroad. Follow this link HERE for further information to participate in the next tour of Saltmarsh House by Niall McLaughlin on 12 September 2024.

Written by Gregory Fonseca, AIA