Hawkins\Brown Architects — UCL Bartlett School of Architecture — London, UK

Hawkins\Brown has completed work on its new headquarters for the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture, one of the world’s leading schools of architecture, at 22 Gordon Street in Bloomsbury. The 8,500m² building will provide accommodation for 1,000 staff and students in a modern, light-filled building built on the structural concrete frame of its predecessor.

22 Gordon Street has been designed by leading architecture practice Hawkins\Brown in collaboration with the UCL Bartlett and UCL Estates as part of Transforming UCL, the largest capital programme in the university’s history. The new building stands on the site of Wates House, the home of the Bartlett in Bloomsbury since the 1970s. The “deep retrofit” project retains the structural concrete frame of the existing building, making substantial interventions to deliver a radically different new building: preserving some memory of the old, while providing high quality, up to date facilities and nearly doubling the accommodation available on the site.