Our project The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art has won one of this year’s NLA Award in the Built Education category. The New London Awards recognise the very best in architecture, planning and development in the capital. 30 projects were announced as winners at the awards which were held at the Guildhall and was attended by the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan who gave the keynote speech.
Just over two years since our first tentative steps towards imagining what sort of space a new auditorium for Worcester College might possibly be like, we find ourselves enclosed within a spidery sketch, looking up to the trees through a skeletal enclosure of steel. We watched in excitement as our drawings were scribed across the site, first in neon spray paint and little red sticks, later excavated into deep ravines. We pick our way across the lines that had become so familiar on paper and are now concrete obstacles in a muddy field. The reality of this transition only became real as we stood looking across at the steel columns in this picture. They map out the positions of the stone fins that radiate around the curved facade of the new auditorium, with the sloping beams above us silhouetted against the bright July sky marking the future locations of the sculpted folds to the soffit.