Trade Publication Article

Two to Tango

Abrahams, Tim

2022

Overview

The new Royal College of Art (RCA) buildings in Battersea, just south of the Thames in London, are a quiet rebuke to the gargantuas designed by a previous generation of architects. Looking out from the fourth-floor balcony of Herzog and de Meuron's new studio building, you do not find a view of the river. Instead, all you can see when peering over the top of the preexisting RCA campus is the vast rump of the luxury apartment block that Foster + Partners built next to its own riverfront headquarters both buildings that helped make the banks along this segment of the Thames an architectural free-for-all of bloated glass-fronted luxury. South London is not without hope, though. Herzog and de Meuron's two new RCA buildings are not small, together providing 181,275 square feet of workshop, studio, and research space. Representing the biggest expansion in the 190-year history of one of Britain's leading educational institutions, this latest addition is far larger than the school's other two campuses across the river in North London. As a pair, the studio building and the research building adjoining it demonstrate the compatibility of modernist architectural nuance with a walkable street pattern and older neighboring structures. London has again been improved immeasurably by the work of the Swiss practice designers of the Tate Modern (2000) and its extension (2016) that has absorbed the city's material culture and added to it so ingeniously.

• Publisher: BNP Media
• Subject: Architectural services / Architecture / Buildings / Colleges & universities / Modernization / River banks / Riverfronts / Rivers