Designing from first principles: Inside David Kohn Architects’ Gradel Quadrangles

Oxford has never been short of architectural ambition. From medieval quads to 20th-century set pieces, its colleges have long used buildings to convey not just status, but evolving ideas about education and community.

Although from the street many appear as bastions of tradition, behind the cloistered walls there is a more urgent dynamic at play. Up until a few decades ago it was normal for students to live in college for their first year and then move into digs of varying degrees of insalubriousness strung out along arteries such as the Cowley Road.

That model has all but disappeared. In its place, colleges are vying to offer a more complete experience – academically rigorous, socially cohesive and spatially integrated.

The expansion of high-quality student accommodation is central to this shift. Colleges increasingly seek to house undergraduates for the full duration of their degrees, recognising the benefits this brings in terms of academic focus and community cohesion. Architecture has long been one of the key ways that colleges signal their intent. And there is something of an arms race underway when it comes to student accommodation.

What a college can be

Despite its name, New College is one of the most venerable of Oxford colleges. Its campus straddles a long and perfectly maintained stretch of the city’s old medieval wall. At its core lies William Wykham’s Great Quad, the first purpose-built quadrangle in Oxford — and a major influence on the evolution of college design.

But unlike many other colleges, New has never made any major 20th-century additions to its main site. The most recent building is George Gilbert Scott’s 1860s New Range, which fronts Holywell Street.

This left it as an outlier among leading colleges in still not accommodating all undergraduates. Having stood apart from the 20th-century building programmes that reshaped many other Oxford institutions, New now faced a moment to define its future through architecture and a major new student housing complex.

That commission – to design a major new annexe for New College on its last remaining freehold in central Oxford – was awarded to David Kohn Architects in 2015. The site, a short walk from the historic heart of the college, came with trees, listed buildings, conservation sensitivities and planning baggage. But it also came with vision.

Then-warden Curtis Price spearheaded the project, with early support from alumnus Chris Gradel, whose £15m donation helped unlock a development that would grow to a £72m budget.

As David Kohn, founder of David Kohn Architects, puts it: “The brief was about how to accommodate all of the undergraduates that currently have to go and find rented accommodation in Oxford.” But the ambition quickly broadened.

“It was always much more than a hall of residence,” he says. “It was a whole way of thinking about what the college could be.”

Designing from first principles

For the practice, established in 2007 and known for its varied – often surprising – body of work, the commission marked a significant first: “We’d never delivered an education building before, never worked in Oxford,” says Kohn.

But that outsider status became an advantage. “If I looked at all the projects we’ve done over the last 18 years,” he continues, “none of them have we done before.” Each project begins afresh — shaped by context, client, and curiosity.

Over the past two decades, Kohn’s studio has gained a reputation for precisely that approach: producing projects that emerge from context and research, often taking surprising formal turns while remaining finely attuned to place. “We realised that’s what we do,” he says, “not having done something before and figuring it out from first principles.”

In Oxford, that ethos has found its most layered expression yet, neither wholly traditional nor self-consciously contemporary – a building that draws on the historic logic of the quadrangle while stretching its boundaries into something more open, layered and speculative.

The resulting development – the Gradel Quadrangles – is both familiar and eccentric, collegiate and porous, rigorous and gently strange. It is, Kohn says, the product of “lots of people engaged in conversations over a very long time.” And a building that might just show where collegiate architecture is heading next.

The site and its constraints

A short walk from the historic heart of New College lies Savile Road, a leafy enclave once on Oxford’s semi-suburban edge. The Gradel Quadrangles site was previously occupied by a loose collection of college-owned villas, a car park and New College School. It sits adjacent to Harris Manchester College to the south and is overlooked to the north by Wadham College’s library by Gillespie Kidd & Coia – a stern, fortress-like presence on its rear elevation.

The site presented a complex inheritance: a conservation area, a grade II listed arts and crafts villa, and a number of mature trees, several of which were protected. “The city had very clear planning rules,” recalled Kohn. “The suburban character with the trees had to be protected.”

This imposed a lightness of touch on the site strategy – a building conceived around existing vegetation and sightlines.

In parallel, the project had to respond to the operational and safeguarding needs of New College School, for which new classrooms and a playground were integrated into the scheme. This dual remit – student accommodation and school – meant the architecture had to carefully balance porosity and separation. The result is not a cloistered quadrangle but a series of open-ended spaces shaped around trees and views, a layout Kohn describes as “landscape-first”.

Competition and commission

Before launching the 2015 competition, run by Malcolm Reading Consultants, the college had made three unsuccessful attempts to redevelop part of the site – each time applying to demolish an unlisted arts and crafts villa and replace it with denser student accommodation. “They’d failed each time in the last appeal,” Kohn explains, and by the time of the competition, “the college’s view was they had slightly blighted their site from a planning perspective.”

The new strategy was to take a more ambitious, holistic approach – consolidating all college holdings in the area and appointing a design team through competition to produce a masterplan that could succeed where previous efforts had stalled

From William of Wykeham to the present

The new development sits in conversation with the architectural lineage that begins with William of Wykeham, founder of New College and credited as its original architect. Wykeham’s quad integrated housing for students and fellows, chapel, library and hall. It was, as Kohn notes, a radical act of mixed-use planning, and “very much about segregating students from townsfolk” and designed with defensive clarity.

That monastic separateness of the main site was softened by 1685 with William Bird’s Garden Quad, an open-sided composition that Kohn describes as “inviting people in” while asserting ownership over the landscape. The Gradel Quadrangles continue this evolution – not simply extending the college, but reflecting its “opening up” to the city.

Kohn’s scheme draws on ideas he traces back to Pevsner’s posthumously published essay on picturesque urbanism. The project unfolds in diagonals and vistas, creating a rhythmic progression from street to courtyard. Gatehouse and tower act as architectural accents – sculptural interruptions in a carefully choreographed urban set piece that privileges both openness and enclosure.

The new scheme comprises 76 student bedrooms arranged in clusters with shared kitchens and social spaces, alongside a new study centre, music performance hall and offices for the charity IntoUniversity, housed in the scheme’s distinctive tower. It also incorporates new facilities for New College School, including classrooms and a playground, bringing together multiple functions.

A proper tower

The Gradel Quadrangles make a distinctive architectural gesture – idiosyncratic, theatrical and rooted in their site. Their distinctive tower, trefoil plan, faceted metal roofscape and richly detailed masonry speak to a palette of influences, historic, formal and circumstantial.

The tower in particular – originally conceived as a modest “tower house” – grew in ambition after the scheme was presented to Oxford’s City Design Review Panel. “If you’re going to do a tower, do a proper tower,” Kohn recalls them urging.

Both the planners and Historic England encouraged something more assertive. “I was a very willing, happy-to-be-egged-on architect,” he adds.

The resulting form draws loosely on the sculptural expressiveness of Gaudí and the geometry of the Melnikov House in Moscow, whose honeycomb windows echo in the elongated hexagonal openings at the tower’s crown. A trefoil plan recurs across the development – in the tower, in ventilation grilles and in the handles of main doors.

Kohn describes the architecture as “quite hybridised… quite heterogeneous”, and points to its capacity for ongoing adaptation. “It’s not architecture that starts with a narrow principle that can’t be deviated from.”

Instead, the process accommodated feedback from stakeholders, conservation officers, donors and the public – “countless decisions that are tied into something synthetic”.

The eclecticism may defy easy categorisation, but Kohn embraces this as a condition of contemporary architecture. The design offers “pleasure… from feeling connected” – to material traditions, to stories embedded in place, and to a future-oriented institutional ambition.

If the building sometimes resists singular readings, it reflects the evolving nature of colleges themselves: layered, open to interpretation and steeped in negotiated meaning.

Accommodation

The student accommodation is arranged in curved wings that arc gently around the site, responding to both existing buildings and trees. This form allowed the architects to introduce subtle variation between rooms – in size, orientation and outlook – so that few feel exactly alike. Windows alternate between vertical and horizontal openings, creating a shifting rhythm across the façades and lending each room a distinct character.

“All the rooms are different,” says Kohn. “They’re not wildly different, but they’re slightly different – and the curved plan allowed for that.”

At the top level, four duplex rooms with mezzanine bed decks offer a more dramatic spatial experience – a deliberate nod to James Stirling’s Florey Building for The Queen’s College.

Internally, the decor is surprisingly utilitarian. The joinery is pared back, the palette restrained and the spatial language intentionally modest. Despite the scheme’s scale, there is no central common room; while a shared study area exists, the social heart of the accommodation lies in the kitchens, which serve small clusters of rooms.

The absence of a shared social space appears to be a deliberate choice – avoiding the creation of a competing centre of gravity to the main New College campus just a few minutes’ walk away.

New performance space

Located beneath the quadrangle, the basement houses a 105-seat performance auditorium — a flexible, acoustically refined venue that serves as both recital hall and lecture theatre. Designed in collaboration with theatre consultant Charcoalblue, the space is constructed as a structurally independent box within the basement, acoustically isolated from the rest of the development to accommodate both amplified and unamplified events.

It is accessed via an intimate foyer, reached by a curved flight of steps descending from the courtyard above to a double-height gallery space, where two large contemporary canvases are hung. The floor is finished in bright yellow pigmented concrete, a splash of theatrical colour that signals transition.

From the centre of the foyer, four apparent routes radiate outward — though one, deliberately, is a “staircase to nowhere”. This architectural joke echoes a similar set of steps on the college’s Mound, a landscaped feature in the main gardens. The two are linked not just in form but in language: each accompanied by a riddle, one in Latin at the original site, and here in Greek.

While the auditorium supports New College’s strong musical tradition, it also offers a new cultural facility to the city, part of a wider ambition to open the college more fully to its surroundings.

Landscape and collegiate space

The Gradel Quadrangles are not solely arranged around a traditional quad but through a sequence of carefully calibrated spaces that feel both collegiate and garden-like.  Kohn describes the scheme as “landscape first”, shaped from the outset in collaboration with landscape designer Todd Longstaffe-Gowan. Rather than treating planting as a late-stage embellishment, landscape was central to the scheme’s spatial logic.

This approach allows architecture and planting to sit in fluid relation to each other, mirroring what Kohn observed in the original New College site – where trees are not central but remain highly significant, “a very symbiotic relationship.”

Paths wind through the development with informality, embracing the existing buildings and mature trees. Together with the curved geometries of the new buildings, they produce a collegiate environment that opens gently to the city.

At the site boundary, an arched gateway frames views inwards, echoing Oxford’s tradition of semi-permeable thresholds. Kohn describes the gate as “very much about addressing” perceptions that Oxford colleges are too closed. Even for passers-by, the message is clear: “This is offered to the streets.”

The Gargoyles and gates: serious play

Although limited in number, the integration of art into the scheme is carefully considered. Among the most striking are the roofline grotesques designed and carved by stonemason Fergus Wessel, with input from artist Monster Chetwynd.

Initially, the college had invited donors to choose their own gargoyles – “all sorts of awful things,” Kohn recalls – but, after some gentle redirection, a more unified narrative emerged. Many of the final carvings now depict animals affected by climate change, including a pangolin and polar bear.

Meanwhile, sculptor Eva Rothschild designed the black-and-gold entrance gates based on a perspectival drawing of a mountain path. These are not just decorative but signal a shift in threshold and experience, subtly different on either side. For Kohn, both collaborations continue a longstanding interest in working with artists – part of an approach that values ambiguity, surprise and layered meaning.

Construction, materials and detail

The project was procured under a design and build contract with Sir Robert McAlpine, a move that Kohn admits came with both advantages and frustrations. “For the most part, exceptional,” he says of their performance, though the final pandemic-affected stages of the project proved particularly challenging.

While design and build typically limits the architect’s influence post-contract, New College opted to retain Kohn as client-side guardian throughout, enabling him to review the contractor’s drawings and protect design intent.

The complex rhomboidal stonework was supplied by Grants of Shoreditch and combines Ancaster limestone with banding in red St Bees sandstone. Kohn notes how the limestone (which includes “blue lenses” remnants of oxidised iron in the lower bed) offered a richness in tone that harmonised with the warm reds of the sandstone. “We chose the two colours because they were complementary,” he explains.

The tower, in particular, makes expressive use of this contrast, with the design accentuating slenderness and verticality. He praises the craftsmanship involved, noting: “Grants were absolutely incredible.”

A key moment came when the team switched from a concrete to a timber-framed roof – a response to both procurement concerns and the rising prominence of embodied carbon. The structure was prefabricated in Switzerland and assembled on site with impressive precision.

“It came as a kind of kit,” says Kohn. “They’re incredibly skilled… they came with these huge mallets and just knocked it together.”

The faceted aluminium rainscreen that caps the building was designed using digital tools. The project’s precise and expressive roofscape – which also ties the new architecture to the gables of surrounding villas – suggests the fulfilment of a long-held fascination with geometric complexity.

Kohn spent a year studying at Columbia University in New York, where he remembers encountering early experiments in digital design that would later coalesce into parametricism – an influence that quietly lingers in the roof’s intricate geometry.

With the challenges of covid and the complexities of working with an active school, the project faced growing pressure as it neared completion. Rising material and labour costs created tensions in the final stages of construction.

Kohn repeats that, while the contractor was “saintly” for much of the build, “towards the end it felt more familiar” – a diplomatic way of describing the commercial realities that began to assert themselves amid soaring pandemic costs. “You have to pick your fights,” he says, acknowledging that not every detail could be delivered exactly as intended. Even so, the core architectural vision survived largely intact.

Sustainability and lifespan

Sustainability was embedded into the design from the outset – not simply through energy performance or material selection, but through a clear intention that this should be a building designed and constructed for the long term. Kohn describes the project as “a building that’s meant to last hundreds of years,” and the decisions around construction reflect this long-term view.

The use of load-bearing stone was part of a conscious strategy to reduce carbon while achieving durability. And the project achieved a 197-tonne reduction in carbon through the decision to move from concrete to timber for its roof structure – a move that earned it recognition as a carbon champion by the Institution of Civil Engineers.

A collegiate patchwork

The scheme’s complexity – its mix of student rooms, school facilities, tower and performance space – could have led to disjointedness. Instead, it feels surprisingly cohesive.

Still, the richness lies in this complexity. The buildings feel stitched together rather than overdetermined – a reflection of the layered history of the site and the evolving character of the institution. “If there are lots of decisions to be made… and you can shape them each time,” says Kohn, “you’ll get what I like to think is a great outcome”.

For Miles Young, warden of New College, the Gradel Quadrangles embody a spirit of architectural continuity and innovation. “When you walk into the Gradel Quadrangles, the first thing you see is a contemporary statue of our founder, William of Wykeham, but in a set of buildings like no other in Oxford,” he says.

“He was an innovator, and David Kohn has emulated his spirit in a remarkable way. There is a truly collegiate sense of place but in a highly original form. Most important of all,  our students just love living there.”

There is a strangeness to the Gradel Quadrangles – a quality that resists the formal rigidity and restraint often associated with prestige university architecture. While Kohn cites the sculptural expressiveness of Gaudí and the layered detail of the arts and crafts movement is evident, others have made comparisons that belong less to the architectural canon than to pop culture.

“Someone said it looked like Teletubbies,” Kohn recalls, referring to a discussion (not implemented) to introduce a green roof. “And that caused all sorts of trouble – the people in college just couldn’t cope. I said, what’s wrong with Teletubbies?”

It is a revealing comment: the building may be finely crafted and richly referential, but it also has a sense of mischief – an openness to interpretation and a refusal to conform to conventional expectations of institutional decorum.

A building for now and the future

At every level, the Gradel Quadrangles articulate a dual ambition: to reflect New College’s architectural lineage while offering a thoroughly contemporary expression of collegiate life. The project builds on centuries of innovation but does so through a new spatial language, one shaped by layered consultation, evolving constraints and a willingness to reimagine the typology from the ground up.

The result is a richly textured, open-ended ensemble. Its form is not governed by dogma, but shaped through conversations with stakeholders, planners and the site itself. This democratic and synthetic design process has produced something that is, in Kohn’s words, “a bit odd” – but also deeply rooted in place, and designed to endure.

With its unusual forms, theatrical sequencing and spirited engagement with landscape, sculpture and the city, the Gradel Quadrangles invite students, visitors and passers-by alike into a conversation about what collegiate architecture might be. It is a building that, while entirely of its time, offers a welcome and at times provocative addition to Oxford’s evolving architectural story. A generous, complex and quietly radical addition to the city.

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