St John's Student Accommodation

Trying to put 500 rooms into a city centre is a very difficult task. You need to fit in with the facades and scale of the surrounding context. That requires two things; different materials, and different proportions to break up the mass.

We as the architects looked at the proportions of the building, and decided to create a number of buildings rather than a big monolithic block because of the scale of the buildings neighbouring the site.

The contribution needed from the materials supplier was to create a complimentary feel to the different buildings. Not by using random materials to create an artificial contrast, but by creating a transition from one to the next so that when you are walking around, the development feels unified – and fits with the Conservation Area -while the brick on each building is actually very subtly different: that was the objective.

The planning officer, conservation officer and myself went to the Taylor Maxwell showroom near Birmingham. It is a fantastic facility because there is such a range of materials that we could actually create a mock-up of each building’s detail inside that one room. If you were with a brick manufacturer you would have to think ‘what would that look like with the panel?’ or ‘What’s the grating colour?’

To be able to look at a panel system next to brick to make sure they were of the same palette and would gel with the surrounding area while still making the
accommodation blocks look like separate buildings allowed us to make them fit into that one area.

The representative photographed all the bricks we were looking at, so we could look at CGIs of the site with different colour combinations. Sometimes when you just look at brick samples you can get a bit “brickblind”, you can’t tell one from the next. They put huge effort into making sure there was the right blend between the materials and laid the images out so that everyone could see how the panels would work together.

What they did was not a sales job. It was just making the local authority officers feel confident that they were talking to an expert who was trying to understand what they wanted rather than pushing certain materials. If someone would say – ‘I’m not too keen on this brick, have you got something less red?’ – They would nip out and come back with one that worked better.

It was a complete precedent within the town: the planning officer said it was the best job they had seen, and the conservation officer was absolutely delighted with it.

“Northampton University were happy, the finished building was very well received. It was a very successful job – everyone was extremely pleased with what Taylor Maxwell do.