Young’s Court Development at Emmanuel College, Cambridge

2025 RIBA East Award
2025 RIBA East Building of the Year sponsored by EH Smith

Education
Stanton Williams for Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Contract value: £21m
GIA: 5,760 m²
Cost per m²: £3,646

The architects have delivered an infill scheme for Emmanuel College that sits comfortably and effortlessly on site, and which subtly elevates the experience of student life. The design stitches itself into what was historically the least glamorous part of the college grounds: Young’s Court, hitherto the location for the college’s car park and delivery service point from the adjacent Cambridge Street.

The programme commences with a glazed courtyard bar and social hub for students, and a landscaping treatment which refers to older university quads in its feel. Through a series of deftly inserted and exquisitely designed blocks, of many scales and using different material palettes, the architects have succeeded in discovering – or, perhaps more accurately, recovering – a great deal of ‘found space’ for them to exploit. 

Red brickwork is used for many of the new exterior walls, but tellingly the bond patterns are varied – horizontally, vertically, perforated – to offer an added visual richness. In doing so, the project demonstrates a truly commendable sensitivity to its place.

Most of the inserted blocks are for new and much-needed student accommodation, enabling 50 students who were previously remotely housed to join their colleagues on this central Cambridge site. Other facilities include teaching classrooms, music practice rooms, fellows’ suites and suchlike.  

More unexpectedly, Stanton Williams has also been able to bury a two-storey car park which relies upon a mechanised vehicle lift to save space. Yet not all this underground realm is used so prosaically. There is also a generous double-height subterranean room which is ideal as a club/performance space, not least because the sound can be damped out entirely so as not to disturb sleeping students above.

Surrounded on three sides by the College’s Grade II*-listed park and garden, great care has been taken to draw in key landscape features to reinforce the Cambridge courtyard layout. Young’s Court itself sports an imposing Persian ironwood tree at its centre, while the renewed South Court has a grid of umbrella-form planes which refer in turn to the massive early 19th-century oriental plane in the Fellows’ Garden. 

As a model for how to conserve and enhance a historic place for future generations, this is a project which is so well integrated with its context that it feels instantly as if it was always a part of the university plan.

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RIBA UK Awards 2025 sponsored by Autodesk, EH Smith, Equitone and VELUX