Rayne Building, Darwin College, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

Summary

College gatehouse and accommodation, designed 1965-1966 and built 1967-1969 to the designs of Bill Howell of Howell Killick Partridge and Amis, with Felix J Samuely and Partners as engineers.

Description

College gatehouse and accommodation, designed 1965-1966 and built 1967-1969 to the designs of Bill Howell of Howell Killick Partridge and Amis, with Felix J Samuely and Partners as engineers.

MATERIALS: the roof has a lead covering, and the reinforced steel frame is faced in grey-brown brick and shuttered concrete.

PLAN: the Rayne Building is rectangular on plan, linking Newnham Grange to the east and The Hermitage to the west.

EXTERIOR: The Rayne building is three-and half storeys in height and roughly 6 bays wide, with five bays of windows on its north and south elevations and a projecting four-storey gatehouse at its west end. The gambrel roof has a lead covering and three box dormers to its north and south slopes; the gatehouse has a flat roof. The walls are constructed of grey-brown brick and have shallow three-storey projections framing each side of the five window bays. The north and south elevations each have a low plinth wall in front of the five bays of windows. Each study bedroom has a projecting boxed oriel window with lead spandrels; the wall over each window is clad with a rectangular lead panel, which appears to puncture through the flanking brickwork and emerge on the other side. The north and south entrances to the gatehouse each have double lead-covered and studded doors, with electric doors to their interior. To either side of the double doors, a pair of shallow projections span the full height of the four-storey gatehouse, infilled with narrow windows to each floor, and a lead panel between each floor which appears to puncture through the flanking brickwork and emerge on the other side. The gatehouse is slightly splayed to the south, and so the windows are slightly wider on that elevation, with metal-framed casements opening to the interior. The west side of the gatehouse has small window openings to the interior shower rooms.

INTERIOR: Inside the Rayne Building, there were originally 34 single study bedrooms over four floors, the six on the ground floor have been converted to offices and lavatories. The interior of the gatehouse provides a passage directly through to the gardens to the south, a porter’s lodge off the east side, and a perpendicular central corridor off which there are rooms to the north and south. From the west end of the corridor, a stair provides access to a glazed lobby on the north side of the gatehouse, from where three-quarter-turn stairs rise with concrete treads; a thick timber baluster rises from the interior side of each tread the full height of the three-storey stair hall to the attic landing, enclosing the stairwell. The ceilings of the stair hall are of shuttered concrete. From each stair landing, a bridge crosses south into the central corridor, from which access is granted to communal facilities such as kitchens, toilets and shower rooms in the south side of the gatehouse. The central corridors and bedrooms have buff-brick walls, unplastered but siliconed to prevent dirt absorption. The floors of the stair halls and corridors are generally covered with square red tiles, and the bedrooms are half-tiled (to the lobby) and half-carpeted (to the bedroom). Throughout the bedrooms, ceilings are boarded, bleached and stained warm grey, as is all the joinery; the attic bedrooms are fully boarded. Each study bedroom has a washing and a dressing lobby between it and the central corridor. The wardrobe which separates the lobby from the bedroom has a recess below it on the room side so that the divan can be pushed back a foot when not in use as a bed, to make it more of a comfortable depth for sitting on. The bedframes of the first and second floor bedrooms and walls of the attic bedrooms retain integrated bookshelves. The main windows are boxed out to give a deep white-painted internal reveal to grade light into the room and avoid glare. Slit windows either side of the boxed-out window likewise throw light onto the side walls of the room and eliminate dark patches near the main light source. A permanent ventilator lets air into the space behind the radiator via a sound-absorbent cavity, so that rooms overlooking the traffic can always get fresh air without noise. This is pulled through the room by the stack effect of the ventilator duct in the dressing area.

History

The house at the corner of Silver Street and Newnham Road, now known as the Hermitage, was constructed in 1853. It was purchased around 1870 by Dr Stephen Parkinson, a celebrated teacher of mathematics at St John’s, who greatly enlarged, improved and renamed the house ‘The Hermitage’. On her death in 1913, Mrs Parkinson (later Mrs Cobb) left the Hermitage to the Master, Fellows and Scholars of St John’s College. In 1954 St John’s assigned a lease to the Association for Promoting a Third Foundation for Women in the University, and thus the Hermitage became the birth-place of New Hall (now Murray Edwards), being leased to them until their new buildings on Huntingdon Road were ready in 1965. George Howard Darwin (1845-1912), the second son and fifth child of Charles and Emma Darwin, succeeded as Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge in 1883, and acquired the neighbouring house, now known as Newnham Grange, as his family residence in 1885. Newnham Grange remained in the Darwin family until the death of Sir Charles Galton Darwin in 1962, after which it was purchased by the Masters and Fellows of Gonville and Caius, St John’s and Trinity Colleges, who announced their intention to found a new college exclusively for graduate students named Darwin College. St John’s sold the Hermitage to Darwin College in 1966.

New buildings were needed to provide graduate accommodation, a pronounced entrance to the new college, and a dining hall to seat 130. These had to fit around the existing college buildings, filling gaps and providing links between Newnham Grange, the Hermitage, and Newnham Terrace to the south (which the college did not yet own but were planning to purchase). The architectural firm of Howell Killick Partridge and Amis (HKPA) were approached in 1963 to prepare designs. The firm came to prominence with their entry to the competition for Churchill College in 1959, where their scheme, though not the winner, was highly admired and led to commissions at Oxford and Birmingham universities. At Cambridge they also designed the University Graduate Centre at Granta Place (1964-7, listed at Grade II), a senior combination room at Downing College, and student accommodation at Sidney Sussex College (both 1967-9). At Darwin College, they contributed a Dining Hall and the four-storey Rayne Building fronting Silver Street, so named in recognition of the generous benefaction from the Rayne Foundation for the construction of both it and the Dining Hall (at a cost of £211,000). The Rayne Building provided a gatehouse to the college, an accommodation block of 34 study bedrooms, and a vital internal link between Newnham Grange and the Hermitage. The projecting gatehouse tower, containing a porter’s lodge and cross passage, solved the ambiguity of two front doors, while the tower contained the stairs and services and absorbed a change in alignment. Between the Hermitage and Newnham Terrace, HKPA added a first-floor Dining Hall, elevated on four pilotis over a small ground-floor car park. Howell intended that the new buildings should blend unobtrusively with their neighbours; they were one of the first HPKA designs to use brick as a facing material, drawing inspiration from the silvery tones of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s nearby Clare Memorial Court. The new scheme was written up in both the Architectural Review and Building journals in 1970 and achieved a Civic Trust commendation in 1971.

Reasons for Listing

The Rayne Building, a college gatehouse and accommodation, built between 1967 and 1969 to the designs of Bill Howell of Howell Killick Partridge & Amis is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:
* as an important university building by Howell Killick Partridge & Amis, a celebrated architectural firm with a number of listed university and residential buildings to their name;
* as a creative solution for a restricted site, with careful consideration given to form, materials and their finish;
* as an inventive post-war interpretation of a college gatehouse and accommodation, and the successful balancing of traditional typological and contextual architectural forms within a modernist structure.

Historic interest:
* as a progression of nearly eight centuries of college construction within the University of Cambridge;
* for its place in the highly significant body of post-Second World War university architecture in England.

Group value:
* for the building's proximity to, and functional affinity with the buildings of Darwin College,
including the early-C19 granary, Newnham Grange, the Hermitage, and the Dining Hall, each listed at Grade II.

External Links

Historic England Listing

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