WORCESTER COLLEGE COMPETITION WIN
JANUARY 2014

Niall McLaughlin Architects are delighted to have been announced as winner of the competition to build a new theatre for Worcester College, Oxford. The scheme was picked from among a strong shortlist, including proposals by Hawkins/ Brown, Ian Ritchie and Purcell Architects. The competition brief was to design a 160-seat theatre, together with flexible studio space, seminar rooms and a small bar to be situated within the sensitive site of the College’s listed gardens. The scheme aims to improve the spaces between the old and new buildings of the College and resolve the relationship between these structures, the gardens and the network of small courts around the edge of the site.

ROWAN MOORE WRITES ABOUT BISHOP EDWARD KING CHAPEL IN THE OBSERVER
APRIL 2013
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.”
Link to the article