27th June 2019

UCA Epsom Competition Win

JRA has won a competition in collaboration with UNStudio to design the new business school for the University of the Creative Arts Epsom campus.

The full team is made up of UNStudio as lead consultant, JRA as local design partner, AKT II as structure and facade engineer, Atelier Ten as building services engineer, and Grant Associates as landscape architect, and was chosen from a shortlist of five practices.

The brief for the competition, judged by UCA and a RIBA Architect Advisor, called for “a unique concept that will seek to provide an environment in which the beauty and free expression of art can mix effortlessly with the rational sobriety of the business world.”

The team’s winning design aims to create a “salon of enlightenment” encouraging collaboration and blurring the boundaries between staff and students across the business school. The new 3,735m2 building will provide space for undergraduate and post-graduate programmes and is expected to house an auditorium, lecture theatre, meeting spaces, offices, and a range of learning environments.

The judges described the entry as an “architecturally distinguished scheme” which “would generate a suite of spaces whose fluidity and transparency aligned well with how a creative business school might function.”