The medieval city of Canterbury is steeped in history, at the end of ancient pilgrimage routes in the southeast of the U.K. The spires of Canterbury Cathedral tower over the tightly wound streets of the city center, but two miles northeast of the cathedral is the University of Kent. Designed by William Holford in a pared-back Brutalist style, the Kent School of Architecture is now the center of a campus that has sprawled over the years.
Holford’s Marlowe Building was originally home to the university’s physics department. But the building has recently reanimated the campus with a gradient of colors popping through the windows of the ground-floor studios. Home to the School of Architecture since 2005, these new colors were part of a renovation by Sam Jacob Studio and the result of an open invitation to refit the architecture studio interiors. The simple off-the-shelf blinds strike through the facade of the 1965 William Holford building using Le Corbusier’s 1959 Architectural Polychromy paint system—a selection of 63 colors that the architect saw as inherently architectural and that he curated to be used together. The palette of the brightly colored blinds includes reds, oranges, and yellows on the west facade and then blends into yellows and greens on the south and hues of blue on the east. “It’s to do with where the sun is in the afternoon,” explained Sam Jacob, director of his eponymous London-based practice. “There is a hot side and a cool side.”
Inside, the color palette continues to highlight Sam Jacob Studio’s vibrant insertions against the muted palette of the concrete and brick Marlowe Building.
The interior of the Marlowe Building feels solid. The ground floor was designed to hold small cellular offices and labs for physicists, hence its rigid grid of timber windows. Sam Jacob Studio’s first move was to remove these partition walls and suspended ceilings. Now, movable partitions are clad with pin-up boards and yellow-tinted acrylic sheets. Amid original timber windows and rows of concrete beams in the ceilings, the result is playful: Radiators are painted to match the palette of the blinds, and sustainable wood wool insulation panels provide acoustic comfort.
In the large open spaces that are revealed, just one wall is inserted on the ground floor and a mere two on the second floor. This creates flexible spaces for students and teachers to use day by day, but that can also accommodate organizational changes as the school evolves amid school-wide uncertainty. This year, management announced that six subjects will be phased out, and while the architecture department is untouched by these axes, it will be merged with the School of Arts in the coming years, necessitating future flexibility.
To gently organize new spaces, Sam Jacob Studio employed two devices: different zones of red and light gray Marmoleum flooring and wheelable storage units. “The ‘red zone’ here is a way of saying, [this is] the circulation strategy,” explained Jacob. But color is also a teaching tool. Three yellow columns (again, Corbusier-selected) reference architectural and art history; the local Canterbury Cathedral; Brancusi’s Endless Column; and James Stirling’s Olivetti Training Centre. “They are completely nonstructural, but they are a bit spatial,” said Jacob. Another spatial play is a high mirror-backed shelf that makes the concrete grid of the ceiling feel endless.
The rigor and abstracted intellect of these hardworking spaces are designed to inspire the students, encouraging them to read the world around them. But the real charm of this project is in the way students are encouraged to remake the space: giving agency to them to participate in their environment and instilling this quality in their architectural education.