Time is geological in Oxford. Its storied streets and colleges are largely sculpted from the same Jurassic belt of Corallian limestone that the English city sits on, much of it taken from the nearby quarry at Headington. What it means to be new takes on a radically different meaning here. The first stones to be cut from this quarry in the 1300s are impenetrably dense, a symbol of permanence to the buildings of some of the older colleges in Oxford, including “New” College’s bell tower. New College, founded in 1379, had the name bestowed upon it when medieval Oxford was still young. Later, in the 16th century, Radcliffe Camera was also built from this stone, quarried from the depths as supplies dwindled, leaving it more vulnerable to erosion from pollution. To call something new in Oxford is to see all that is ancient was once fresh; stone is used here so that what is billed as new can eventually become permanent.
New College has seen the steady erosion of its once-pristine golden limestone by the hands of time. In April 2024, David Kohn Architects (DKA) completed New College’s Gradel Quadrangles, a student accommodation complex of 94 en suite bedrooms and separate shared kitchens, study rooms, offices, and an auditorium, as well as new spaces for the adjacent New College School. In his 2020 essay “The Stones of the University of Oxford,” Professor Danny Dorling described the university’s buildings as “a place in which to hide away from the material world,” where defensive architecture “emptied out” quarries so that scholarly pursuit could be protected from society at large. DKA’s Gradel Quadrangles reinterprets the quadrangle building type—a now-archetypal Oxbridge form of which New College has the first purpose-built Great Quad, with a chapel, great hall, and student rooms built as one in 1403. Nearly three centuries later, New College added Garden Quad, the first three-sided quadrangle, which led out to the gardens with an ornamental mound at its center. “You can start to see the town on the horizon. It’s open to the landscape,” as David Kohn described it to AN. Today, the meandering elevations of DKA’s Gradel Quadrangles present the first curved quadrangle; it may not be a radical plan, but again, time moves slowly in Oxford.
Kohn described Garden Quad as giving the practice “a clue to what you could do with this next project.” In 1403, the college was defined by a defensive structure separating “town and gown”; by 1685, the architecture had begun opening to the landscape, reflecting the college’s decision to allow townspeople to take up residence and pay for education. As Kohn observed, “Even though it’s at quite a glacial pace, we’d like to reflect how the colleges continue to be opening up…. How does one make it a welcoming place to study?”
Despite these gestures toward openness, the project remains firmly rooted in the lineage of Oxbridge collegiate architecture, where a distinct separation from the outside world persists and only fellows can walk on the grass. The notion of permeability is carefully balanced. There is a welcoming gesture toward the street—students may walk on the grass—yet as with all Oxbridge colleges, access is tightly controlled behind a key card gate.
The site came with a history of planning battles. “The college’s view was they had slightly blighted their site from a planning perspective,” explained Kohn. With three failed planning applications, a Grade II listed villa and an unlisted arts and crafts villa, and numerous tree-protection orders, the college knew that it needed a bold, high-quality proposal if it were to unlock its last freehold site in Oxford. Though the project began as a way to accommodate students in the college who had to find rented housing in Oxford, ambition quickly grew, helped by a £15 million (nearly $20 million) donation from alumnus Chris Gradel. Kohn described the brief as about “much more than a hall of residence. It was a whole way of thinking about what the college could be.”
This approach is most evident in the transition from an elegant gate and porter’s lodge to a landmarking tower at the quadrangle’s entrance. The tower design references historical motifs—a trefoil plan, chapel-like windows—ensuring that its function as something marking the continued lineage of New College is unmistakable. Without this clarity, Kohn argued, a tower risks ambiguity: “Unless it is bold enough and self-confident enough, you read functions into it that are not helpful. Is it a residential tower? Is it some bit of infrastructure?” The nature of the windows and their decorative quality affirm the tower’s role as a deliberate and integral part of both the composition of the new college complex and the evolution of the college as an institution. Kohn remarked that the college warden (the head of an Oxford college), Miles Young, regretted that they did not push the tower taller, so that it could look over the college’s nearby historic site.
This quadrangle sees new colors of stone rub up against the monotone Headington of much of the city center. The variegated Ancaster limestone is mainly cream in tone, but up close flashes of chalky white and pale blue stand in bright relief, the blue from oxidized iron in the lower bed of the quarry. Less often, flames of red appear in the diamond formation of the stone blocks that pick up on the pink Cumbrian sandstone plinth and jagged cornice. This facing stonework ties back to the concrete frame and therefore lacks the solidity of the centuries-old stone architecture of the main New College site, but still the facade, built by Grants of Shoreditch, in its diamond-shaped blocks comes to life as the sun shines on it, its apparently flat face dancing with the veins of the stone and subtly undulating surface.
Gargoyles and grotesques, 24 in all, are playfully incorporated into the sandstone cornice, riffing on the ubiquitous forms seen across the city but this time of animals that are threatened by the climate crisis. All were chosen by Dr. Ashleigh Griffin, professor of evolutionary biology at New College, and author and academic Katherine Rundell. Animals such as a pangolin, a gecko, and a moth cling to the roof of the building as they continue to evade extinction. The roof, too, reinforces this sense of organic rhythm. Highly insulated and covered in polygonal anodized aluminum tiles, it breaks from the rigid geometries of traditional quadrangles, lending the building a softness that counterbalances Oxford solidity.
Less poetically, in the limestone of the tower is a carving of New College founder William of Wykeham, with the college motto, “Manners Makyth Man,” emblazoned below it. Some things never change in Oxford, but this new addition bends and bulges, much like the scales of a pangolin, forming a rich interplay of movement and solidity. The weight of time is everywhere. Though the buildings defy the trend of university accommodation as quickly and poorly constructed anonymous shells, the series of buildings still exist in a lineage of donors attaching their names to university buildings—not just to build a legacy of philanthropy but perhaps to offset corporate transgressions.
Stories can never be rewritten in Oxford, a city where history moves at a measured pace—exclusive at best, a tool of empire at worst. New additions do not erase the past but build upon it, sometimes in an act of quiet atonement. The Gradel Quadrangles embody this continuum, adding another stratum to the storied fabric of New College, perpetually new, yet already woven into the city’s deep geological and architectural history.
Ellen Peirson is a London-based writer, editor, and architect.
→ Continue reading at The Architect's Newspaper
