'Prison-like' student housing wins Carbuncle Cup for worst building http://gu.com/p/3tc4e/tw via @guardian
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'Prison-like' student housing wins Carbuncle Cup for worst building
UCL accommodation with windows facing on to walls reveals a wider problem with the standard of student housing
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Oliver Wainwright
theguardian.com, Thursday 29 August 2013 12.26 BST
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465 Caledonian Road
Shadow gap … UCL's New Hall housing, 465 Caledonian Road, has been declared the worst building of 2013. Photograph: Ellis Woodman/BD
Cramped rooms with low ceilings and one small window facing directly on to a brick wall. If you crane your neck, you can just about see the outside world. It could be a description of the cells in Pentonville Prison, but these are the conditions enjoyed just down the road from the Victorian jail in a new student accommodation block for University College London – today announced as winner of the Carbuncle Cup by Building Design magazine, for the worst building of the year.
Looming behind the retained brick facade of a nineteenth-century warehouse, the 350-bedroom hulk squats on north London's Caledonian Road like a beached whale, trying to hide its copious grey flanks behind the dainty Victorian mask. Spilling out on either side, and climbing up to 11 storeys, it is a bizarre Frankenstein concoction: its floors rise out of step with the existing facade, meaning more than half of the street-facing bedrooms look straight on to the brick wall, only one metre away.
"It utterly defies belief," says Islington councillor Paul Convery, who chaired the planning committee that refused Mortar Developments permission for the building in April 2010 – a decision that was overturned on appeal six months later. "Now that it's been erected, it slaps you in the face how totally wrong the building is."
The catalogue of calamities continues well beyond the facade of the £18m colossus. Islington refused permission not only on grounds of excessive scale, massing, bulk and "incoherent elevation treatment", but on the fact that the rooms suffered from inadequate daylight, poor outlook and lack of privacy. Around the back, where the building greets the adjacent train line with a blunt grey cliff, bedrooms face their neighbours' windows as close as five metres away – in a borough where the minimal residential overlooking distance is 18 metres.
The building backs on to the adjacent train line with a blunt grey cliff. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright The building backs on to the adjacent train line with a blunt grey cliff. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright
But this list of ills was batted aside by the planning inspector, on the grounds that the rooms' main function would be for sleeping, "due to intensive daytime activities taking place at the university campus". The lack of privacy, daylight and standard residential amenity, he therefore concluded, was "unlikely to be perceived as overly oppressive by the occupiers". Paying up to £730 per month for the privilege, students might feel differently when they move in later this year.
"It's absolutely atrocious," says Hannah Webb of the UCL Students' Union. "Everyone deserves natural light, and students often use their rooms during the day for studying. It's just another disgraceful example of UCL trying to profit from its students, with no thought for their welfare."
"Daylight is not a luxury, it's a necessity," agrees Colum McGuire, vice president of the National Union of Students. "We wouldn't expect or accept windowless rooms for any other sector of society, and so there is absolutely no reason to think such provision is acceptable to students."
But planning regulations suggest otherwise. The UCL scheme, designed by Stephen George and Partners – which won the Carbuncle Cup in 2007 for its grim Opal Court housing development in Leicester – is a hall of residence, which falls into the same use class (C1) as hotels and guest houses. Due to their limited occupation, these building types are exempt from many of the codes and standards that govern residential dwellings (C3) – from daylight to acoustics – while the developer is often excused from the usual obligation of providing an affordable housing contribution.
All this makes student housing an attractive proposition for investors, with short-term lettings providing regular opportunities to hike price levels and adjust lease terms. Piled high and sold not-so-cheap, building student silos can be a lucrative business: Knight Frank reports that it currently outperforms every other commercial property class, with rental income across the whole sector worth around £4bn per year.
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