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‘the college can champion the creative, collaborative exploitation of digital technology through vocationally focused design and communication courses’
Baker says the move is already paying off, with over 60 per
cent more applications this year than last, when its Chislehurst location meant no-one quite took the place seriously. Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication, as it was then called, was formerly housed in four buildings in Chislehurst in Kent (the Ravensbourne name comes from the Thames tributary, on whose banks it sat) opened in 1976. In many senses it has now simply moved upstream. The old place was formed through merging local art and design colleges. But in retrospect this was very much about teaching in separate buildings and in silos. And, as time went on, the institution
and bought the college’s old site and is now building social housing there, with some of the cash from the deal going towards the £70m cost of Ravensbourne in Greenwich. Foreign Office has designed a building which has flexibility
and new ways of working as its watchword. Once inside the main entrance, which faces onto a tree-lined public space by the O2, a large ‘welcome space’ is a hubbub-filled central atrium ‘for the city at large’, according to Zaera-Polo. ‘The institution should not be an ivory tower, detached from the world, but integrated with other schools and the business com- munity.’ This, the college hopes, will be a very public place, an
© Morley Von Sternberg
realised that it needed to overcome the growing perception potential students and businesses had that this was a place that was out of touch, and too divorced from a real world where collaboration and group working was becoming much more the norm. Something, in other words, had to be done. So, around seven years ago, the college went in search of a
new site in central London. After a good deal of looking, Meridian Delta donated the Greenwich peninsula site, after which Ravensbourne ran a tender for the design of a new building to go on it, won by FOA. Taylor Wimpey came in
inviting space for people who are curious about quite what goes on inside such an interesting looking shell, and which draws on the footfall from the O2. From here, visitors are faced to the left with a delicatessen, and in front the Walker exhibition space. Looking up, visitors and students can see (and doubtless hear) activity – students in ‘lessons’, preparing for filming, watching flatscreens, queuing to hire equipment from the central store – on all nine stepped floors, which horseshoe around the central area. On the other side of the building facing in the other direc-
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