The Royal College of Art’s new £135m design and innovation campus designed by Herzog & de Meuron
(Picture: Iwan Baan)Some 86 per cent of the British public has never set foot on a university campus, never mind studied on one, Dr Paul Thompson, Vice-Chancellor of the Royal College of Art, tells me. It’s a sobering figure, and indicative of a shift that has been a long time in the making.
From its origins in the 1851 Great Exhibition, the RCA and its antecedents have been putting art in service of industry. And for several years in a row, the RCA has been named the world’s best art and design university. And yet, during those years, there has been a steady move from what you might call the directly “arty” to STEAM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) at the college, and this has been reflected in an architectural shift - away from South Kensington to its new Battersea campus.
