Gort Scott’s interventions at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, can be described in three parts: the pavilion, the Anniversary Building and the landscape.

The pavilion is the showpiece: a 275m2 event space that sits at the fulcrum of the site, a bend in the river and on-axis with the college entrance. In plan it is pentagonal, and the bulk of the footprint is occupied by a double-height space, also pentagonal and fully glazed to give views down the river (in two directions), across to Christ Church Meadow and back towards the entrance.

While the pavilion is steel in structure (bronzed universal columns are exposed on the inside, while stainless precast tensioning elements are visible in the roof), externally it is defined by bladed precast concrete columns. These increase the depth of the facade, giving a play of light and shadow, and play with the transparency of the building edges – from an oblique view, it appears solid, whereas a more straight-on approach reveals its transparency. As the sides are not parallel, this leads to a perpetual dance of the solid and the permeable.

The building sits partly on the foundations of Milham Ford, an old school building that had been converted to include teaching accommodation and the chapel. These have been hollowed out to allow space both for the Cherwell to flood, and for the river to provide passive cooling of the pavilion, continuing an interest in natural ventilation evident in the practice’s Hills Road office project in Cambridge.

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