Standing like the brutalist lovechild of a factory and a multi-storey car park, the Royal College of Art’s colossal new studio building in Battersea is an arresting thing to behold. Its brawny brick flanks extend for 120 metres down the street in an unbroken line, defining a stack of raw concrete floor slabs that project out to form long covered balconies, wrapping around the building like the decks of an ocean liner. A cartoonish pair of supersized factory roof lights crowns the great hulk, trumpeting that this is a place where things are made.
Down below, a treacly black carpet of asphalt extends inside the building from the road through big, fire-station doors, while picture windows frame views into the workshops from the street, where the creative theatre of drilling, sawing and welding is played out. This is a rough, tough place, the building wants to tell you, where dirty, creative chaos can reign free. As long as you don’t screw anything into the precious brick walls or make a mess in the courtyard, that is.
Designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, who have form with artful brick monoliths, the RCA’s new £135m complex is an apt reflection of the college’s split personality. On the one hand it wants to be a hothouse of making, a power station of physical production. On the other, it is styling itself as a hi-tech research centre, pioneering marketable “thought leadership” at the latest digital frontiers.
This dual existence is embodied in the architecture: while it looks like a factory from one side, it could be the corporate headquarters of a tech company from the other. On the south-east corner, sleek fins of white aluminium wrap their way around a cubic tower of offices, shielding a world of whiteboards, breakout pods and private phone booths. Through the windows you can see clusters of researchers plotting the future of self-driving cars, while others fiddle with drones. It feels like a startup incubator airlifted from Silicon Valley, bolted on to a refurbished relic from London’s industrial past.
