De Breyne And Hayward Buildings At Keble College, Including Middle Common Room And Bar, Fellows Flat, Transformer Station, Workshops And Gates

De Breyne and Hayward Buildings at Keble College, including Middle Common Room and Bar, Fellows' Flat, Transformer Station, Workshops and Gates

A block of 82 study bedrooms for fellows, graduates and undergraduates, with two fellows' flats, middle common room and related facilities, a workshop and electricity transformer station, built 1971–3 and 1975–7 by the architects Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, with Peter Ahrends as partner in charge and Graham Anthony as job architect. The structural and mechanical engineers were Ove Arup and Partners.

The building is constructed with a honey-coloured brick exterior to Blackhall Road, paviours to a covered walkway, blockwork inner walls, and brown acrylic-painted aluminium patent glazing with bronze tinted glass facing the internal quadrangle. The plan resembles a snake slowly uncoiling down Blackhall Road, descending in height from five storeys to one. Study bedrooms at the higher end are set in pairs off staircases with kitchens and showers on alternate levels. The transformer station and one flat are separated by a set of gates from the workshop, the other flat and common room at the low end of the principal building.

The elevation to Blackhall Road is treated as a wall with chamfered corners and copings. Projecting buttresses reflect the form of the Gothic buildings behind and conceal slit windows to kitchens and showers, with narrow paired windows to study bedrooms. Larger windows light the first-floor flat which has a roof garden set over the workshop. A round opening in the single-storey wall masks a garden to the second flat. Similar brick treatment appears on the end of the De Breyne building facing the quadrangle. On the garden side, continuous patent glazing is angled over the walkway in semi-basement with a ventilation gap between it and the brick walls, and is also angled over the lowest range of bedrooms and staircase entrances. Each floor of glazing projects slightly from the face with chamfers above and below, and features a continuous pattern of brown mullions. Identical brick and glass treatment is applied to the corresponding faces of the middle common room, which has its entrance down steps in matching paviours via tree planters. Rooftop landscaping in built-in beds was designed by James Hope. A brown door with a glass panel of the rounded-edge style typical of the early 1970s leads to the bar. Solid timber gates open to the workshop yard. Beyond this the building is treated as a wall, in which a circle with a timber screen lights a small courtyard.

The interiors contain a spiral staircase with toplighting at the end (DB1). The other staircases have straight flights, set between unpainted brickwork and exposed concrete floors. Study bedrooms feature fixed shelving and fittings designed by John Makepeace, who had already collaborated with Ahrends, Burton and Koralek at what is now Templeton College. The walkways have paviours matching the honey brickwork. The principal interior is the middle common room, which has a walkway set round fixed areas of seating defined with brickwork, semi-circular fixed seats and layout designed by Makepeace, with pendant light fittings over each table. The bar occupies the inside wall. The student flats have fitted shelving and cupboards devised by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek and Makepeace.

Ahrends, Burton and Koralek were appointed in 1969 following an invited interview to extend Keble's accommodation on a site suggested by the development plan of Casson and Conder. Their first proposal was to retain the nineteenth-century houses on the site and link them by a covered way, which survives in the present scheme, but the college decided on a new building and had begun an appeal. The result is a clever solution to fitting on a tight site and a brilliant response to the difficulty of relating to Butterfield's flamboyant Gothic neighbour. This was the first use of a curve in Ahrends, Burton and Koralek's work, later to become one of their hallmarks. Its honey-coloured brick and angled dark glass provide a sophisticated contrast to Butterfield's work. The building is immaculately detailed and little altered, and is probably Ahrends, Burton and Koralek's best-known and most successful English work. The solution to the tight site is reminiscent of Powell and Moya's equally celebrated narrow buildings at St John's, Cambridge, and Christ Church, Oxford, though more sinuous and romantic in its treatment. The architecture responds to its difficult brief with an exceptionally clear, cohesive and successful solution.