El nuevo edificio para el Colegio Ravensbourne de Diseño y Comunicación en Greenwich tiene como objetivo no sólo actualizar sus instalaciones para desarrollar las nuevas tecnologías digitales que brindan nuevas oportunidades al diseño, la artesanía y los medios de producción, sino también para convertirse en un centro para el diseño y la industria de medios que se espera florezcan en este nuevo sector de Londres.

The new building for the Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in Greenwich will be located on the South-Eastern edge of the Dome building, to the right of the North-South axis that structures the masterplan.

By moving to this extraordinary location, the College aims not only to update its facilities to engage with the new opportunities that digital technologies are open to design, craft and media production, but also to become a hub for the design and media industry that is expected to flourish in this new sector of London. The main strategies in the design of this building are to produce a structure that will enforce cross-fertilisation between the different departments in the school and the community of practitioners. This will be achieved by structuring the building around a system of two interconnected atria, piercing each through 3 levels of program. The atria have been systematically attached to the external facade in order not only to use them as ventilation devices, but also to connect visually the core of the public spaces in the building with the perception of the urban surroundings.

The building is specified to reach a Breeam qualification of environmental excellence. In order to achieve optimum environmental performance, low maintenance and high flexibility, the massing has been kept as compact as possible, with a very low ratio of façade to area, for which it’s been proposed a rather deep building of 31m, that provides deep flexible space to host the various activities in the building. The need for studio spaces and workshops, and the low-lighting levels required by the film studios and predominantly IT-based activities lend themselves naturally to this typology of space.

The architecture of the building has been designed to capitalise on the tradition of Arts and Crafts Schools in the UK, from which Ravensbourne College is an offspring. Gothic rose windows and flower patterns have been a rich field of inspiration for the project, but in this building they will not be produced as an imitation of nature but as an abstract construction. To achieve this we have resorted to the use of a non-periodic tiling pattern on the façade, which allow us to build seven different types of windows out of only three different tiles.