Saïd Business School extension - University of Oxford
Saïd Business School extension - University of Oxford
In 2000 the University of Oxford began a comprehensive development programme, the first element of which was the development of the Saïd Business School in 2005. The school was hugely popular and quickly needed to expand as part of a £18.8m second phase, undertaken by architects Dixon Jones and completed in 2013.
We worked as structural engineers alongside Dixon Jones to produce a sensitive, contemporary take on a traditional Oxford college. The 5,895m2 phase II building, known as the West Wing, houses the Thatcher Business Education Centre and adds half as much again to the total floorspace of the School on a more compact footprint, providing three 72-seat ‘Harvard-style’ lecture theatres at ground floor level, with offices, seminar rooms, and a high-quality dining room and club room above. Slotted in between the first phase and the railway station to the west, it is organised around a six-stage straight staircase. The staircase rises through half the building’s 60m north-south axis brings natural light deep into the section from top-level, west-facing clerestory windows and provides access to the upper floors. The first floor contains the Club Room and Dining Room - the latter a rather elegant, two-part volume with a truncated, copper-clad pyramidal roof above its northern segment.
The materials replicate those of the original building, including a copper-clad pyramidal roof aligned with the former’s tower, with the addition of polished black granite around the entrance. As it extends north of the first phase building, it has an east façade where a pergola fronts onto gardens on the site of a medieval monastery.
The school is clad in light Bath Stone with a black granite-clad entrance pavilion. The structure is made of reinforced concrete flat slab construction, founded on reinforced concrete piles. A geothermal heating/cooling system was integrated into these piles as part of the sustainability strategy of the building.
The landscape design by Turkington Martin ensures the building creates a frontage to a new public space at the eastern gateway to the city and reveals a sequence of internal collegiate spaces which are expressed as cloister, quadrangle, courtyard and garden. The design of the Fellowes Garden is informed by the historic plan of a Cistercian abbey which once occupied the site.
“…far more significant than these architectural punctilios is the boldly orchestrated physicality and spatial definition of the east-facing architecture of the building, and the way it refers to the original school. It’s an adroit modelling of the experience of views and promenades - and shows how a new building can re-express the tectonic and material nature of its predecessor in a way that seems both familiar and surprising.”
- Jay Merrick, writing in the Architects’ Journal, 2013
Client: University of Oxford