City of Westminster College
1 / Introduction
Replacing the old City of Westminster College, this RIBA award-winning building represents some of our proudest work in the education sector. Four separate campuses were brought together to provide outstanding facilities, spacious environments and cutting-edge technologies within a single holistically designed, sustainable building.
Creating flexible and future centric spaces to inspire students throughout their learning was the key concept for the new City of Westminster College building. The stunning architectural form demanded challenging thinking to support the end result of a beautiful, enriching new college that serves both the students and the public.
Schmidt Hammer Lassen’s vision of a simple geometric form around a dynamic, spiralling central atrium created one of our key challenges for the project. The stepped design of the building’s shell and sweeping lines of the interior required a collaborative, co-ordinated and multi-disciplinary relationship between our many services and the architects to find the optimum balance between economics, structures and physics that achieved a beautifully high quality finish.
Speech intelligibility and control of distracting background noise is vital for the good communication of knowledge in educational buildings. The interconnectivity that is inherent in the design required an innovative solution from our acoustic engineers. The atrium at the heart of the building could easily overwhelm the surrounding libraries and classrooms so our experts crafted specific local solutions for each environment, creating exceptional aural experiences.
City of Westminster College is perfectly designed to serve the public and students with innovative, inspiring and sustainable spaces to interact, learn and grow.
Key facts
- RIBA award winning building
- Simple geometric form around spiralling central atrium
Related Disciplines
The Project Details
Client: City of Westminster College
Architect: Schmidt Hammer Lassen
Buro Happold services: Building services engineering, structural engineering, acoustic engineering, asset management, fire engineering design and risk assessment, facade engineering, sustainability, disability design consultancy