The Greenwich Penninsula in London is home to the Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication, a campus that was completed in 2011 by the now-defunct Foreign Office Architects.
The notable feature on the campus is it’s facade, composed of 28,000 aluminium tiles that imitates ceramics. They come in three or four colors and are arrayed in different patterns for a mosaic effect that plays out over the surface of the building. Primrose patterns emerge alongside rounded windows.
The architects told Dezeen:
The architecture of the building has been designed to express the culture of contemporary production, by using a non-periodic tiling system which symbolises a more diverse and contemporary approach to technology.
Gothic rose windows and flower patterns have also been a rich field of inspiration for the project, but in this building they will not be produced as an imitation of nature but as an abstract construction.
To achieve this we have resorted to the use of a non-periodic tiling pattern on the façade, which allow us to build seven different types of windows out of only three different tiles.
Foreign Office Architects was a firm headed by the husband and wife team Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera-Polo. The studio was established in 1993 in London. The college was one of FOA’s final projects, the firm closed when the couple’s marriage ended.
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Photographs by Morley von Sternberg.
Wow !