Half a century later, Cowan Court turns the picturesque Brutalism of the original college towards the 21st century. Sustainability, accessibility, landscape and a new approach to communal and private space transform the raw sensuality of the brick and board marked concrete courts of the original college into an innovative, contemporary, low-energy timber building. The staircase that traditionally serves and defines a vertical community of rooms becomes a cloister, bringing circulation towards social spaces positioned around enclosed landscaped woodland at the centre of the building. The rooms served by the central cloister are all fully accessible and frame views outwards, towards Churchill’s extensive open playing fields and meadows.

Three storeys, square court, the same footprint as the existing courts: Cowan Court evolves many features of the original college buildings. The untreated reclaimed oak cladding echoes the textured board marked concrete and the colour of brick in the original college. New pale oak adds refinement in the lining to the cloister and triple glazed windows. The bay windows, characteristic of original student rooms, reappear as deep window seats within the thick, insulated walls of the energy efficient new building. In summer, the densely planted birch forest within the court shades an informal garden for students to meet and study, which turns to orange in autumn and opens to the sky in winter.

The materiality of Cowan Court forms part of an ambitious environmental strategy; passive ventilation, triple glazing and super insulation reduces the amount of energy consumed in construction and in use. Solar electricity, solar water heating and rainwater collection reduce the energy requirements yet further.

6a won an international competition to design this first new court in the college in 2008. The existing buildings were designed by Sheppard Robson following one of the most important architectural competitions of the post-war period. Today, the listed college is one of the finest examples of English Brutalism in the UK. Cowan Court responds to the original in a contemporary timber construction. In three overhanging floors, the jettying timber cuts recall the concrete bands across the facades of the existing courts. Each of the facades is curved like the entasis of a classical column, and the square windows of the student rooms spiral up and across, chasing around corners in playful misalignment.

Text provided by the architect.

Both this natural, elemental emphasis, and re-reading of historical sources, informed the approach to light in the space. Inspired by the play of daylight created in the buildings of John Soane, here it enters through gaps in lateral concrete beams, from skylights overhead, and flows in from the garden spaces. Accessed through glass doors that run the width of the site, there exists no real division between interior and exterior space; nature is never external to the building but runs like a current through each set of permeable boundaries.

The entrance hall is lit from above by a triple height space, crossed by a steel mesh bridge. From here, office and post-production studios are accessed via a fire-protected glazed staircase, functioning as a light well to channel illumination into these rooms. The atelier-style office is the most public space of the project, connected to the external world by a large street-facing window.

The central studio building is one almost entirely uninterrupted room, flanked by suspended storage spaces, which lower the ceiling height to create intimacy at either end. These are reached by narrow staircases, which are the only punctuation of the floor area and are accompanied simply by a slim brass rail. Brass detailing repeats throughout, with handrails elsewhere and doors furnished by custom-made brass knobs, bringing refinement to the white concrete blocks and lime mortar of the load-bearing walls.

The final building in the sequence features a ground floor kitchen, with a sauna and top lit yoga space above. A view onto the last garden reverses the vocabulary of the central studio space, in which the internal storage stairs create silhouettes against the garden doors. Here, instead, an escape stair descends externally, reiterating the studio’s constant back and forth between inside and outside, above and below.

The studio is passively ventilated and highly insulated with a high thermal mass provided by its raw concrete and blockwork structure. It is also triple glazed, ensuring optimal energy performance. Rainwater is collected for use in the garden and photovoltaic and solar heating panels augment electrical supplies.

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The production and assembly of the timber elements for the building drew on the collective knowledge of the involved carpenters, joiners, and suppliers. In the production, each of the 12.000+ individual oak off-cuts from Dinesen’s floor production were pre-cut to size with minimal waste, pre-drilled, and pre-treated with tar at our carpentry before being transported to the site. In the assembly of the facade on site, each individual oak element required precise handling and 20 000+ stainless steel screws for fastening, reinforcing the robust, assembled and layered character of the cladding.

The resulting building negotiates a landscape of rocks, lichen, ferns, conifers and deciduous trees on a bluff, facing the sea of Skagerrak on the south-eastern coast of Norway. Avoiding reshaping the terrain, the building is meticulously adapted to the north-east sloping ground, forming three volumes that are situated on five different levels. Outside, the three volumes create two distinct spaces separated by an openable wind-barrier: a courtyard towards the forest that is protected from the wind and an open deck towards the sea which holds views through an existing pruned “window-band” in the conifers.

Inside, each space has a distinct volume and ceiling height, with the central hallway giving clear views through the whole house and the windows, stretching the full length of the facade towards the sea, bringing unity and coherence to the different levels. Where the exterior oak cladding will turn silvery-grey over time and blend in with the slate and granite landscape, the interior Douglas cladding is kept in a slightly warmer, whitish hue, balanced by the neutral screed floors.

Text provided by the architect.