Chipperfield brings creative calm to revitalised RA school of art

There is a tiny art school sandwiched between the grand buildings of London’s Royal Academy. The historic academy building, entered through a noble courtyard from Piccadilly, has long had two strips of studios and workshops in its back yard, one designed around 1870 by Sydney Smirke, the other added later by Norman Shaw. When David Chipperfield Architects drew up a masterplan in 2008 for the RA and its newly acquired 6 Burlington Gardens – previously the Museum of Mankind and in the distant past the garden of the Royal Academy’s Burlington House – there was an opportunity to create better, warmer, studio spaces and update the down-at-heel workshops.

Thanks to the history of the school, and a substantial donation, the revitalised school goes by the title of the Royal Academy Schools Julia and Hans Rausing Campus. The plural ‘schools’ is a reminder of the disciplines, each taught in different schools – painting, sculpture and so on. It was a list that once included architecture and that, since the refurbishment and new studios, can include time-based art. This is where up to 17 students a year come, as post-graduates, to enjoy the privilege of three years of free art education and a studio space in the heart of London. Through it have passed John Soane, Anthony Caro, Michael Armitage and many more.

Until Chipperfield reworking of the RA the school was hidden. With the two buildings brought together it finds itself in middle of the expanded RA. It sits at its crossroads in fact, as since 2018 visitors moving between buildings have been able to cut through it, with a glimpse either side of the long, sculpture-filled Cast Corridor delineated by delicate steel gates and a small gallery showing some projects that students are working on.

Chipperfield’s concrete bridge, completed in 2018,  joins the two grand buildings and flies over the school and the back court – now renamed the Lovelace Garden. Curator and director of RA schools Eliza Bonham Carter describes how the school has changed from being ‘quite hermetic’ and ‘divorced from the rest of the academy. Now its presence is more evident to visitors to the RA as a whole.’

During the masterplan works the school found more breathing space as the workshops were moved into the lower ground floor of Burlington Gardens, across the courtyard – freeing up the beautifully curated Cast Corridor to run its full length again. Now the studios and other spaces have been cleaned out, rationalised and given level access, with zinc replacing the tarpaulins on the roof, airtightness and better glazing. 

‘Students won’t be standing in puddles,’ says Martin Hampson, head of material processes. Like all such projects, much of the work now appears invisible. Looking around, Mattias Kunz of Chipperfields muses: ‘We’ve not really done much.’ The huge amount of work (estimated at £15 million in 2019) is all the more invisible thanks to the work of Julian Harrap Architects, which included the careful cataloguing of the historic fabric down to planes of glass in the old doors. 

For the students themselves it is the renewed envelope, with bright but modulated light from the north lights, and the new services, that will undoubtedly make the most difference. But now that students each have more studio space, might the cross-fertilisation of ideas suffer? The school was keen to use the project to build a sense of shared artistic experience.

Each studio has two doors so there is always an excuse to walk through and see what others are up to. This is gives an enjoyable sense of weaving between spaces when you are walking around the school. On the downside though, it demands circulation space which cuts right across studios that have already been inhabited with canvases, sculptures-in-progress, paints and materials, spare shoes and all sorts.

Away from the material activity of creativity, an intense library has been drawn – with typical Chipperfield rigour – into a room deep in the plan where a mezzanine used to chop up the space into a stuffy art handlers’ hideaway. The floor has been lowered, again invisibly – each of the York stones moved by hand – so there is now level access. A café for students has been similarly freed up with its new spare timber panelling – almost ‘too beautiful’, says Bonham Carter, remembering the informality of the earlier café. ‘It is pristine but it needs the layering of use.’ There is one newbuild element, a timber-framed infill to what was the RA’s East Yard, now a studio waiting for its artists to arrive. 

The life drawing room is described by the RA as its ‘moral heart’, although life drawing rarely forms a significant part of its students’ practice nowadays. But the room itself, with curved benches upholstered in leather, remains a place of lectures and parties and gatherings; students facing a stoic stuffed Bengal tiger alongside a wall of displays that deliberately eschew the dominance of the male form. It looks a historical piece, but one moving into the 21st century; replacing the melange of glass from different eras in its north lights means it is far better for drawing now, having a consistent dispersed light. As the RA’s Hampson says, ‘It is far more atmospherically sound.’ 

In keeping out the rain, bringing in light and creating a space with an atmosphere of creative calm, this seems a fitting final piece of the Royal Academy puzzle, for now at least.

Top image: Weston Bridge and The Lovelace Courtyard. Credit: Simon Menges

IN NUMBERS

Area 2200m²
Artist-students per year 17
Opening date of schools 1815