Wallace Building

The Wallace Building is a large educational facility designed specifically for teaching Natural Sciences, including geography, geology, botany, and zoology. It was built in the classical-modernist style typical of the Percy Thomas partnership and is designed to harmonize with the earlier library located across the campus. The building features buff Tondu brick with ashlar dressings and has a flat roof.

It is primarily two storeys high, with a basement at the southwest, and is arranged as a long northeast-southwest range flanked by shorter northwest-southeast wings. These wings serve as advanced outer blocks to the main range, which is further highlighted by a prominent entrance block at the center. This entrance block has a strongly projecting concrete frame that emphasizes a continuous grid of concrete, which includes the glazing of the ground and first floors, interrupted only by a wide doorway and flanking glazing.

The long ranges on either side of the entrance also exhibit a grid-like effect in concrete, featuring continuous strips of windows at the ground and first floors, separated by slender vertical and horizontal bands, with recently renewed metal glazing bars. The outer wings have a slightly different design; here, the windows are taller and the vertical divisions are more pronounced, while the panels between storeys remain blank. The basement storey at the southwest has simple framed square windows.

Inside, the building boasts a grand entrance hall with a staircase at the rear, illuminated by circular windows and a curved glazed ceiling. Teaching rooms and laboratories open off long spinal corridors.