Rayne Building, Darwin College

Rayne Building, Darwin College

The Rayne Building is a college gatehouse and accommodation designed in 1965-1966 and built between 1967 and 1969. It was designed by Bill Howell of Howell Killick Partridge and Amis, with Felix J Samuely and Partners acting as engineers.

The building is rectangular on plan and serves to link Newnham Grange to the east and The Hermitage to the west. It is three-and-a-half storeys in height and roughly six bays wide, topped with a gambrel roof with lead covering and three box dormers to its north and south slopes. A projecting four-storey gatehouse with a flat roof projects from the west end. The walls are constructed of grey-brown brick and have shallow three-storey projections framing each side of the five window bays on both north and south elevations. Both elevations also feature a low plinth wall in front of the window bays.

Each study bedroom has a projecting boxed oriel window with lead spandrels. Above each window, the wall is clad with a rectangular lead panel which appears to puncture through the flanking brickwork and emerge on the other side. The north and south entrances to the gatehouse each have double lead-covered and studded doors with electric doors to their interior. To either side of these doors, a pair of shallow projections span the full height of the four-storey gatehouse, infilled with narrow windows to each floor and a lead panel between each floor with the same puncturing effect through the brickwork. The gatehouse is slightly splayed to the south, making the windows slightly wider on that elevation; these are metal-framed casements opening to the interior. The west side of the gatehouse has small window openings serving interior shower rooms. The reinforced steel frame is faced in both grey-brown brick and shuttered concrete.

Internally, the Rayne Building originally contained 34 single study bedrooms distributed over four floors. The six ground-floor bedrooms have since been converted to offices and lavatories. The gatehouse provides a passage through to the gardens to the south, with a porter's lodge off the east side and a perpendicular central corridor. From the west end of the corridor, a stair with concrete treads and thick timber balusters rising from the interior side of each tread extends the full height of the three-storey stair hall to the attic landing, enclosing the stairwell. The ceilings of the stair hall are of shuttered concrete. From each stair landing, a bridge crosses south into the central corridor, providing access to communal facilities including kitchens, toilets and shower rooms in the south side of the gatehouse.

The central corridors and bedrooms have buff-brick walls, unplastered but siliconed to prevent dirt absorption. The floors of the stair halls and corridors are generally covered with square red tiles, whilst the bedrooms are half-tiled to the lobby and half-carpeted to the bedroom. Throughout the bedrooms, ceilings are boarded, bleached and stained warm grey, as is all the joinery; the attic bedrooms are fully boarded. Each study bedroom has a washing and dressing lobby between it and the central corridor. The wardrobe separating the lobby from the bedroom has a recess below it on the room side to allow the divan to be pushed back a foot when not in use as a bed, providing a more comfortable depth for sitting. The bedframes of the first and second floor bedrooms and walls of the attic bedrooms retain integrated bookshelves.

The main windows are boxed out to provide a deep white-painted internal reveal to grade light into the room and avoid glare. Slit windows either side of the boxed-out window throw light onto the side walls and eliminate dark patches near the main light source. A permanent ventilator allows air to enter the space behind the radiator via a sound-absorbent cavity, ensuring rooms overlooking traffic can receive fresh air without noise. Air is drawn through the room by the stack effect of the ventilator duct in the dressing area.