{"id":211373,"date":"2025-10-19T16:59:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T16:59:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/211373\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T16:59:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T16:59:13","slug":"the-185m-building-that-opens-up-oxford-university","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/211373\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u00a3185m building that opens up Oxford University"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAs we move further into science and further into AI,\u201d says Stephen Schwarzman, \u201cthere are still going to be human beings around\u201d \u2013 which will come as a relief to all concerned. \u201cI thought I should do something to reaffirm the importance of the human being,\u201d he adds. That something was a \ufeffdonation of \u00a3185m\ufeff to \ufeffOxford University, \ufeffthe largest in its history,\ufeff to fund the biggest single building that it has ever erected in one go: the \ufeff\ufeff25,300 sq\ufeff metre (272,000 sq ft) Stephen A Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.<\/p>\n

This building, whose cost is undisclosed, houses nine \ufefffaculties\ufeff and institutes\ufeff that range from the ancient subjects of philosophy and music, \ufeffas well as English, history and languages, to \ufeffthe new \ufeffInstitute for Ethics in AI.\ufeff It additionally includes, at the donor\u2019s insistence, performance venues and galleries where a public cultural programme linked to the work of the faculties can be put on show.<\/p>\n

Schwarzman \u2013 who is the chair\ufeff, \ufeffchief executive and co-founder of the US private equity group \ufeffBlackstone\ufeff, and is said to be worth\ufeff about $50bn \ufeff\u2013 is speaking to camera in a digital briefing on the just\ufeff completed endeavour. He stresses its ancient\ufeff and\ufeff modern theme: \u201cIt\u2019s very satisfying to play a part in the future and to be part of the elegance and beauty of the past.\u201d A portion of the brief for the project was that it should be a contemporary version of a traditional Oxford building, and so its highly engineered fabric is wrapped in an exterior of \ufeffClipsham stone,\ufeff the material \ufefffrom \ufeffwhich much of the city was built\ufeff.\ufeff Its style is also an updated and abstracted version of classical architecture.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

The facade of the Stephen A Schwarzman Centre, wrapped in traditional Clipsham stone<\/p>\n

The building is designed by \ufeffHopkins Architects \u2013\ufeff a practice with a knack for being tech and trad at the same time \u2013 whose founders \ufeffPatty and the late Michael Hopkins made their name in the 1970s \ufeffwith a radical\ufeff but\ufeff refined house for their own use in \ufeffHampstead, north London,\ufeff in skinny metal and glass\ufeff. Later, with the\ufeff Mound Stand at Lord\u2019s \ufeffcricket \ufeffground\ufeff and the \ufeffrebuilding of Glyndebourne \ufeffopera \ufeffhouse\ufeff, they found ways to combine modern materials and techniques with stone, brick and timber. \ufeffWith Portcullis House, the\ufeff office building for MPs next to the Houses of Parliament, \ufeffHopkins invented a millennial Tudor style out of bronze, stone and air ducts.<\/p>\n

The new centre for the humanities stands \ufeffin the \ufeff\ufefffour hectare (10-acre) Radcliffe Observatory Quarter,\ufeff a campus created on the site of a former hospital that now includes the \ufeffMathematical \ufeffInstitute\ufeff and the \ufeffBlavatnik School of Government,\ufeff respectively designed by the late\ufeff Rafael Vi\u00f1oly (of Walkie-Talkie skyscraper fame)\ufeff and\ufeff Herzog\ufeff & de Meuron (Beijing Olympic stadium, Tate Modern)\ufeff\ufeff. \ufeffStudent accommodation for Somerville College by the Stirling \ufeffprize winner Niall McLaughlin \ufeffstands to one side. The place is a stamping ground for \ufeffbig donors and famous architects that is not yet more than the sum of its parts, with big statements in curved glass and gridded concrete shouting at each other across some rather shapeless open spaces.<\/p>\n

The idea is to create the opposite of the introspection of Oxford buildings and the inviolate college quads<\/p>\n

In this context, the Hopkins building is a peacemaker\ufeff that, despite its size, presents a relatively modest fa\ufeffcade to the open space, with some softening planting by the \ufefflandscape architects Gillespies\ufeff<\/a> and a small-scale south-facing loggia, where you \ufeffmay want to sit and linger. From here you can enter the building unimpeded \u2013 public access being something that both the university and Schwarzman wanted \u2013 and pass along a broad route to its other side.<\/p>\n

In the middle, you find its architectural tour de force: an atrium that rises to a glass dome, surrounded with galleries that give access to the faculties and libraries. This space is made of slender concrete columns and slightly arched beams, with oak balustrades in between, rising to a filigree octagonal structure overhead, whose timber slats break up the sunlight from above into patterns of brightness and shade.<\/p>\n

\"\u2018A <\/p>\n

\u2018A tour de force\u2019: the atrium rises to a filigree octagonal glass dome surrounded by galleries<\/p>\n

The idea is to create the opposite of the introspection and exclusion of many Oxford buildings: it is meant to be the \ufeffantithesis of the inviolate squares of grass that occupy the centres of college\ufeff quads. To judge by the busy but peaceful hum of large numbers of people passing through and spending time in the building, it has succeeded.<\/p>\n

You can, alternatively, descend a central staircase to a re-carpeted double-height foyer from which you reach an underworld \u2013 unsuspected on the outside \u2013 of performance spaces. There is a \ufeff100-seat cinema, a 250-seat theatre, \ufeffand a highly wired \ufeff\u201cblack box performance lab\u201d \ufeff\ufeffthat, with multiple screens and speakers, can create almost any audio\ufeffvisual experience you \ufeffmay want. There is also the 500-seat Sohmen concert hall, whose poised and largely timber interior strives with subtle curves and slight angles to create a perfect acoustic.<\/p>\n

All is realised, as is the Hopkins way \u2013 and in collaboration with the contractors\ufeff Laing O\u2019Rourke \ufeffand many specialist fabricators and consultants \u2013 with impeccable attention to such things as the precise tone and finish of the concrete and the connections between different elements.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

The 500-seat Sohmen concert\u00a0hall<\/p>\n

The centre is built to Passivhaus international energy performance standards, which means high levels of \ufeffefficiency, and is the largest such building so far in the \ufeffUK. Despite the traditional look of its masonry, much of the centre was prefabricated in factories, which makes for faster construction and better quality, with storey-high stone walls being transported on lorries to site and craned into place.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s a building that is about doing things well. You could argue that, the filigree octagon apart, some drama is lost to its oaky evenness: you could imagine another version of this project that has some fun with the contrasts and surprises of its extraordinarily rich brief. There could be more excitement, in particular, about the descent into a multi\ufeffvenue cultural centre underground. What it does do is to create a civilised and welcoming environment in a dignified building.<\/p>\n

This, \ufeffgiven that there are plenty of buildings \u2013 even well-funded ones \u2013 that do none of these things, is no small achievement.<\/p>\n

Photographs by Hufton+Crow\/David Levene<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cAs we move further into science and further into AI,\u201d says Stephen Schwarzman, \u201cthere are still going to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211374,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-211373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}