Practice working on 12,000sq m Hertford College scheme with landscape architect Kim Wilkie
Niall McLaughlin Architects have followed up their 2022 Stirling Prize-winning Magdalene College library in Cambridge with plans for a student accommodation scheme in Oxford.
The practice has submitted an application for a 12,000sq m development for Hertford College, the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA), Kellogg College and Reuben College.
It will occupy the interior of a mostly residential block of land bounded by Banbury Road, North Parade Avenue, Winchester Road and Bevington road, providing six new graduate accommodation buildings and converting existing villas at 43 - 45 Banbury road into student rooms.
A range of social spaces will also be housed within the Hertford College pavilion along with new department buildings for the South-east Asian Studies Centre.
Niall McLaughlin Architects said the Oxford scheme had been inspired by the neighbouring North Oxford Victorian Suburb conservation area’s residential context and the site’s existing villas.
Each accommodation building has been positioned directly behind existing villas, while street-facing buildings reference the scale and style of villas in the neighbourhood while allowing sightlines into the centre of the development within the site’s interior.
The new structures will be set within gardens designed by landscape architect Kim Wilkie, who Niall McLaughlin Architects previously collaborated with on designs for a revamp of the Natural History Museum’s grounds that was largely scrapped in 2020 in favour of scaled back proposals by Feilden Fowles, which started construction last autumn.
The pair also worked together on a masterplan for a new 150-bed student accommodation campus for University College Oxford in the city centre.
Niall McLaughlin’s The New Library at Magdalene College beat five shortlist rivals including Hopkins’ 100 Liverpool Street, Henley Halebrown’s 333 Kingsland Road and Mæ’s Sands End Arts & Community to win UK architecture’s top prize last October.
The scheme for the 700-year-old college was described by RIBA president Simon Allford as “sophisticated, generous, architecture that has been built to last.”
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