Behind the Scenes : The Marshall Building

Charles Saumarez Smith words and photos
Member of The Architecture Club

Ed Reeve, Harry Tarbuck, Jan Friedlein, and Nick Kane supplementary photos

A group of us went on a guided tour of the recently opened Marshall Building on the south side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, taken by Julian Robinson, the LSE’s long-standing Director of Estates who has obviously been an important figure in developing the LSE’s complicated group of buildings, commissioning a series of major architects through public competitions.

The first was Grimshaw, who did the New Academic Building which opened on Kingsway in 2008. Then, O’Donnell & Tuomey did the Saw Swee Hock and, more recently, RSHP did Centre Building, completed in 2019 (I unfortunately missed the Club's 2021 tour).

We started in the big, ground floor entrance space which is key to the success of the building, because it establishes its successful combination of concrete, sculptural monumentality with informality in the way that the spaces are used:-

In theory, the space is public although the whole area feels so dominated by the LSE that it doesn’t feel as if someone might really wander in uninvited. But there is still an effective sense of an open community. We were introduced to the history of the project, which was the result of a public competition in 2016, won by Grafton Architects, based in Dublin, who at that point were relatively less well known, although they had been visiting professors at both Yale and Harvard and, in 2014, had been represented in the Royal Academy’s Sensing Spaces exhibition:-

We also discussed the quality of the engineering by AKT II, which is highly complex, based on two independent columnar structures which stretch up through the different floors of the building and support extremely wide roof spans. One of the successful qualities of the building is that although its exterior façades suggest a logical layout, the interior spaces are, in fact, quite complex in the way that they are laid out. And the great entrance atrium has an character of informality, enhanced by wooden carrels along one of the walls where people are either working or chatting and a long bench along the window wall which looks out onto the adjacent Portsmouth Street with its second hand bookshop and pub.

Upstairs we were shown one of the relatively small lecture theatres.
There has obviously been a change in attitude towards public lectures reflected in the character of the spaces. Instead of big formal lecture theatres seating 400 people, which are now regarded as too authoritarian, too much about the individual performance of the lecturer, the preference is for smaller spaces, where everyone can sit at their lap top and are encouraged to be interactive. There are also big windows, making the lecture theatre attractively light. On each floor, there is quite a bit of deliberately ill-defined public space for students to work informally, half focussing on their laptops, but in social space which encourages casual interaction.

On we went up to the top floor, where students are able to go out onto terraces with amazing views out in all directions over London, an amazing place for meetings or presumably to work or hold classes in the summer.

We then went down to the double-height basement which has a vast Sports Hall for cricket, tennis and badminton, as well as spaces for music practice and weight lifting.

We ended in the outside world, where we were able to admire the three distinct façades. The North façade faces on to Lincoln’s Inn Fields alongside the Royal College of Surgeons:-

It provides a public face to the university: austere and rectilinear, but with a degree of intelligent complexity, the product of a long tradition of academic high mindedness. Round the corner and next to the The Old Curiosity Shop which is in the process of restoration, the west façade faces on to Portsmouth Street which has been pedestrianised and provides the closest LSE has to a central gathering space. Grafton Architects have provided a long concrete bench which mirrors the equivalent bench indoors.

I think everyone was impressed. I certainly was. The building is intelligently complex — in some ways, neo-brutalist because of its use of concrete, but humanised by the amount of thought and care which has gone into the patterns of informal student use. I would expect it to be a candidate for this year’s Stirling Prize, although it may be handicapped by the fact that Grafton Architects’ Kingston University building which shares many of the same characteristics won two years ago.