Niall McLaughlin Architects are delighted to have won the competition for a proposed new development for Balliol College in Oxford. The project brief is to increase and upgrade the College’s undergraduate and graduate student accommodation and provide conference facilities and a sports pavilion. The commission gives the practice the opportunity to revist the design of the student room cluster and create a series of buildings arranged around quadrangles and gardens.
Architecture critic Rowan Moore has written a review of the Bishop Edward King Chapel with the title “The Answers to their Prayers” that was published in the Observer Magazine. The article touches on the broader themes of the interpretation and appropriation of religious symbolism in architecture, and in this context praises the paradoxical nature of the chapel; “It is…heavy and light, a bastion and a boat, a wall and a drape. It has presence, but doesn’t dominate.” Describing the form and materiality of the building Moore writes, “The building is crafted and considered: it makes ideas physical: it has intentions and carries them out in its space and matter.”