In the pink: Allies and Morrison’s School of Public Health

Five years ago you would have been forgiven for asking: what is public health? Then came Covid and we were thrust among daily briefings, disease tracking, policies and prevention. Health leaders emerged from obscurity and filled our screens. Since then, unsurprisingly, Imperial College London’s School of Public Health has seen an increased interest in its courses. However, Allies and Morrison’s new building for the school in north-west London was first conceived in 2017, predating all this.

In some ways, the building is modest. Facades breathe in, recede, or step down, back or in – attending to their different contexts. You’re never presented with a fully formed rectangular face. At eight storeys, stepping down to four in one corner, it mediates between a looming accommodation block on one side and a Victorian terrace on the other. It’s also eye catching and adamantly cheery. Pink metal cladding, playfully described by Allies and Morrison director Laurie Hallows as ‘desert sand at sunset’, frames large windows. These are set back into a lattice of precast concrete with 80 per cent limestone, creating a whitish hue. The overall impression is of a muted, regimented candy cane.

Located in Imperial’s White City campus, devised to enable expansion and external collaboration, the School of Public Health completes a cluster of educational, research and residential projects around a central green on the north site. The building brings together formerly far-flung research teams whose studies range from infectious diseases and obesity to how long children spend on their phones. Work is data-driven and largely desk based, but with community groups coming in for sessions and outreach.

A horseshoe of common area wraps around a reception desk and speed gates on the ground floor. Spaces for teaching occupy floors 1-2 and research and community engagement floors 3-7. The eighth level remains ready to be kitted out as soon as need and funding arise, while the facade is extended upwards to screen the roof plant behind.

You may imagine that serving the needs of students, researchers and the public – as well as different modes of teaching – would require an elaborate, Tetris-like design, but Allies and Morrison has kept it simple. Floorplans were designed around a standard bay size of 7.8m x 7.8m for flexible and generous configurations. A bay, the width of a double window unit, can be subdivided into two smaller rooms or combined to create larger spaces where needed. ‘It’s a very mathematical, rational building,’ reflects Hallows. On the third floor, one bay is a community engagement space (tubs of Lego fill the cabinets and a felt-tip scrawl is pinned up), four bays are grouped to form an open-plan office space for researchers, and another is sectioned into two two-person offices.

No lecture theatres were necessary as the school mainly offers postgraduate courses and has deliberately shifted to more interactive and seminar-based approaches. Design-wise, this was liberating and allowed for more adaptable, multiuse set-ups. The main teaching space on the second floor is three bays but can easily be divided using a manually operated partition.

Another quirk is that the school offers a fully online master’s course – and has done for years. ‘I had never heard of Zoom when we started in 2017,’ recalls Hallows. ‘Yet, in every meeting room, it was part of the brief to always have a screen for hybrid collaboration at all different scales of space.’ This stipulation has really paid off post-Covid, with spaces well equipped acoustically and technologically.

A complementary palette of pinks and burgundy follows you through the building – in the stairwell metalwork, acoustic panels, kitchen units, tiling and smaller meeting-room doors. ‘We didn’t want the building to feel clinical to members of the public,’ says Hallows, explaining the choice of colour. ‘It’s responding to the terracotta and brick of the Victorian terraces and is also a warm, healthy, kind of shade.’

Glazing wraps around three sides at ground-floor level, allowing views of the common area while letting light in. People are chatting round circular tables, informally working on higher benches and even playing table tennis. The glass is set in from the main facade, creating a covered porch space for school groups to gather or for students to socialise. Chunky, circular concrete columns line this outdoor area and also feature inside the building.

All these small moves create a sense of continuity between inside and out, soften the threshold between public and private and prepare visitors for the space they are about to enter. However, the atmosphere could have been completely altered if a very strict Secure by Design officer had got his way. ‘He wanted full-height speed gates [in the lobby], like you’re going through customs,’ says Hallows. ‘It would have been intimidating. He luckily retired!’

Public health is a wide-ranging and people-focused subject and Allies and Morrison’s building embodies that. It’s adaptable, inviting and attends to the needs of a variety of users. Walking around, it feels healthy. Windows at the end of corridors offer natural light and sightlines across west London and the campus’s central green. Concrete is exposed where possible, most notably in the beautifully pared-back main staircase, creating a real sense of refinement and tangibility throughout.

The pinky palette is charming in places yet, in a less generous mood, I scribbled ‘fleshy’ and ‘sludgy’ in my notebook. However, jumping on the tube after my visit, I looked up at Latimer Road, one stop away, where the platform is awash with soft pinks and caramel reds. The School of Public Health’s shades may not be to my taste but they’re certainly of the locale.

In numbers:

GIA 7,940m²
Number of people using the building daily 270
Embodied carbon 255kgCO₂eq/m² 
Air-tightness at 50pa 2.59m³/h.m²