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| Photo: Philip Vile |
The Sackler Building is the new home for the RCA’s painting department, located opposite the sculpture school and forming the second phase of the college’s new Fine & Applied Art campus in Battersea. The aim has been to create contemporary spaces matching the quality and character of London’s best painting studios.
Prior to 1991, the painting department was housed in generous purpose-built Victorian studios behind the V&A in Exhibition Road. Faced with a leaking structure, the expiry of the lease from the V&A and the then rector Jocelyn Stevens’ desire to unite the departments in a single campus at Kensington Gore, the RCA commissioned a new building in Jay Mews. Designed by John Miller & Partners, it housed a number of departments including painting. The transition from the Exhibition Road premises – with huge windows and a towering mural studio – to the smaller, lower-ceilinged studios of the restricted site proved a challenge.
The £3.4m Sackler Building was always conceived as a conversion: the old building – a single storey factory – has been transformed into a series of new day-lit spaces under a dramatic new roof form through the insertion of an independent steel structure within the existing brick enclosure.
The plan is based on a simple arrangement: six double-height, top-lit studio spaces are arranged, in series, off a wide (2.6m) central corridor space, which also serves a row of side-lit studio spaces; a galleried mezzanine floor overlooking the double-height studios provides access to an upper level of smaller top-lit studios. The specially profiled roof allows north light to be achieved throughout without direct glare from the sun, providing ideal studio conditions.
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| Model of projected Fine & Applied Art campus; the Painting School is |
The large studios, which feature underfloor heating, are almost cubes – 8 x 7.5m in plan and 7m high – and can be subdivided into as many as six individual studio spaces if required. One of the double-height studios is a designated tutorial room which will also be used for exhibitions and lectures. A secure workshop for frame making and an open workshop for cleaning brushes are located at the north end of the corridor.
The organisation of the studios around a generous corridor is a traditional art school arrangement and echoes the typology of the Royal Academy and the Exhibition Road building, providing both a social space and an exhibition venue.
The interior has been designed to be sufficiently robust to take the knocks administered through the daily activity of painting: the openings to the studios are lined with rough sawn oak reinforced with raw steel angles; handrails and balustrades are mild steel finished with beeswax; the floors are sealed concrete; all ready to take the layers of colour that will build up over time. Staircases at each end of the building are designed with large central wells to allow canvases to be hoisted up to the studios above. All services distribution routes are exposed in the central corridor space for easy upgrade and access.
While established mainly for cost and programme reasons, the retained brickwork provides a material link to the building’s former industrial use. The inserted accommodation sits above the existing brick walls, and being shiny and metallic contrasts strongly. The new roof expresses the form of the north-facing roof lights. A sinusoidal metal profile captures light uniformly and suppresses panel joints into a homogenous surface.
The external brickwork base remains essentially as found but with the windows lowered to allow more daylight to penetrate the side-lit studio spaces. The top of the existing window heads effectively dictated the level of the underside of the new first floor level at 3.5 metres and provided a generous proportion for the ground floor studios. Where new interventions were made in the facade or old openings were concealed, they are clearly defined through the use of applied render panels. The new galvanised steel windows are set within stainless steel window linings.
Engineer Max Fordham was instrumental in developing two key environmental design principles: that the building should be naturally ventilated and that lighting, both natural and artificial, is optimised for painting.
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| Photo: Hélène Binet |
There are several criteria for consideration in the design of studio day lighting. These are: high light levels; consistency of light with variation over time minimised; avoidance or minimisation of direct sunlight penetration, high colour rendition, and a degree of directional lighting to achieve good levels of modelling.
Daylight provision to the studios was developed with reference to the nineteenth century studios at the Royal Academy Schools in London, where consistency in light levels is achieved through exclusively north light. A large-scale model was constructed and tested under an artificial sky to quantify the daylight factor in each main studio type. Rooflight glazing is surface textured, to diffuse westerly sunlight during those limited periods of the year when it enters through the rooflights.
The chosen roof profile is a double row of north facing lights per structural bay which provided the highest level of daylight factor and allowed the small studios to retain an individual rooflight if subdivided.
Artificial lighting is used to supplement the natural daylight through a series of intermediate colour temperature (4000 Kelvin) fluorescent lights which can be incrementally switched on 30% at a time; the light tubes are placed on the sloping glazing bars of the rooflights so that the light always emits from the same source.
The building operates on the principle of natural ventilation based on air movement from low-level windows up to the circular roof vents in the apex of each roof bay. This works because the studios are all interconnected and there are no doors between the spaces. The natural ventilation principle aims to avoid the internal air temperature exceeding the external by more than 2°C, by the use of exposed thermal mass and solar control glass in conjunction with night-time ventilation. The ground floor studios are the main source of the fresh air intake and have two vents, the upper of which stays open at night in summer to enable secure night-time cooling of the space; the mezzanine and double height studios have large circular opening vents.
Originally the high level vents were to be located in the sloping roof lights but as the vents are left open for night purging of the building in summer there was thought to be a risk of rain penetration into the studios, so a system of cowelled openings in the vertical faces of the roof was adopted instead.
The technical solution to inserting a new structure within the shell of the existing building was developed by structural engineer Price & Myers. A suspended ground floor slab on a piled ground beam system supports the new steel frame structure above. The latter provides the dual role of bracing the existing perimeter walls as well as providing the free spans necessary for the large studios; the frame is braced in one direction and relies on portal action in the other. For ease and speed of construction a precast concrete mezzanine floor and precast concrete staircases were used.
The roof structure is of saw-tooth form and utilises a prefabricated system of perforated metal lining panels and glazing bars to span between the principle structural members on the principle grid-lines.
Project team
Architect: Haworth Tompkins; qs: Gardiner & Theobald; structural engineer: Price & Myers; m&e consultant/lighting: Max Fordham Consulting Engineers; planning consultant: DP9; main contractor: LIFE Build Solutions; client: The Royal College of Art; photos: Hélène Binet, Philip Vile.
Selected subcontractors and suppliers
Profiled anodised aluminium panels: Cadisch; W20 galvanised steel windows: Crittall; galvanised steel doors: Forster unico; curtain wall system for pitched roof lights: Schüco; steel: Metsec; heavy duty K-Screed floor screed: Isocrete; engineered Russian oak floor boards: VictorianWood Works; metal stud walls: Lafarge; Rigidur fibreboard; British Gypsum; Tactray 90 metal liner trays: Britmet Tileform; glass: AGC Flat Glass, Saint-Gobain; ironmongery: Assa Abloy; light fittings: Dextra Lighting; sinks/kitchenettes: GEC Anderson.
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