The Royal Veterinary College in Potters Bar is a potentially dangerous place. It is the first site I have visited that presents the biohazardous risk of infection from exotic disease should safety directives not be followed. That this world of laboratories and dissection rooms is located at the outer limits of London feels appropriate. It is an area where animals (from racehorses to cattle) can roam free in the green belt but the intellectual heft of a world-class research institution can coexist. Two London architecture practices, Hawkins Brown and Architecture PLB, have completed two new buildings on site which fit the unusual requirements: one, an ?18 million student residence and refectory, the other, an ?8?million Teaching and Research Centre.
The Royal Veterinary College is a great London institution. It was founded in 1791 with its original home in Camden Town, just as Lord Camden was planning his transformation of that rural district. The college's first job was to carry out a post-mortem examination on a racehorse named Eclipse, whose phenomenal success led scientists to try to establish what made the horse so fast. That operation was the symbolic foundation of the veterinary profession in Britain.
The college still occupies the site of its first home and gives its name to the road it sits on: Royal College Street. But as Camden urbanised and became a central district of the growing metropolis in the 19th century, there developed a need for a campus with access to fields and paddocks. In 1958 the Hawkshead Campus in Potters Bar was opened, housed initially in a series of temporary looking single-storey buildings (some of which still stand). These were complemented in the Eighties by a clutch of buildings so ugly that one is nicknamed 'the Chef' due to its striking resemblance to a well-known motorway-side diner.
Architecture PLB's Teaching and Research Centre forms the main entrance to the college and contains a series of high-specification research laboratories. And Hawkins Brown's new refectory (almost everyone stays on site all day, so the restaurant can seat 200 people at a time) and series of brick pavilion buildings make for swish student accommodation. These are a step change in architectural quality for the campus, building on the success of the Eclipse construction, designed by Nicholas Hare and completed in 2003.
The overall master plan is quite beautiful. The college has special dispensation to build on the green belt, and the position of the buildings gives one the feeling that this is the end of the city. When you arrive at the campus by car, you are faced not with a building but with a large, tapering green area between two groups of buildings. This looks out to paddocks (one of which is used as a living blood bank for horses), and then to woods beyond.
On the left is the new refectory, with its mottled brick base and protruding, western red cedar upper storey. Behind this are the new three- and four-storey student accommodation blocks housing 205 students, and occupied since September. They are a step back from the landscape but feature oriel windows, giving great views out from student bedrooms, which start from ?100 a week.
On the right-hand side is the new entrance building by Architecture PLB, again clad in timber, but with a grand window looking out on the landscape and serving as a vitrine with objects from the historical collection of the college on display.
Student vets do two years at the campus in Royal College Street in Camden before moving to Potters Bar for three more, so they are relatively grown up as students go. Also, academic standards are very high, and students spend much of their time working in their rooms. Both the new housing and the Teaching and Research Centre are intended to make the campus a little more sociable. The apartments have a communal kitchen/dining room with generous ceiling heights, custom-designed furniture (the phenolic plywood desk and wardrobe are a classy touch) and a more adult atmosphere in general than most student accommodation I've seen.
The flats are accessible from external walkways, giving generous outdoor areas for students returning from the fields in muddy boots. Hawkins Brown's buildings have an enjoyably permanent character, which is down to the controlled use of materials on the exteriors. Beautiful brick, nicely detailed timber, and bronzed, perforated metal for staircases sit easily in the landscape.
The Teaching and Research Centre looks more institutional, with the long, louvred windows on the southern fa?ade keeping direct light out of research labs. Architecture PLB had a tricky combination of uses to contend with and have designed a building that has a very clear front and back. The reception area is tall and is the beginning of a promenade upwards that ends in a top floor with wonderful views across the landscape. Along the way are generous balconies and spaces for informal gatherings.
As you move through the building, there are also unexpectedly unrestricted views into research laboratories, a move intended to demystify the work of research vets. It certainly adds to one's sense of the real function of the building, but the pipettes and test tubes within didn't enlighten me about what their work really means.
Much more interesting is the cabinet of curiosities on display in the atrium entrance: small animal skeletons, painful-looking surgical instruments and so on that show something of the development of the profession.
The main focus of both buildings, though, is their place in the landscape. The college should be applauded for employing architects who understood the site so well. The work feels only half done, though. Many ageing buildings remain and the new buildings hide rather than solve the incoherent mess of the rest of the campus.
For me, these buildings understand something intangible about the institution's relationship with London. The college links commerce and farming, inner London and rural Britain, Camden and Potters Bar, and the buildings accentuate those links. They have made a little bit of London in the green belt, in which both humans and llamas should feel at home.
Source: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-24028808-is-there-an-animal-doctor-in-the-house.do
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