Royal College of Art, Dyson Building, London

The RCA Dyson Building is the most significant new development to the Royal College of Art since it moved to Kensington Gore in 1962 and forms the centrepiece of the RCA's new Battersea Campus. It contains the printmaking and photography programmes, new business incubator units, a gallery and 220-seat lecture theatre. The building is conceived as a creative 'factory' both in the industrial sense (as a place of industry), and through the reference to Andy Warhol's 'Factory' as a place of art production. The building's aesthetic is functional and derives from the way it has been made - an in-situ concrete structure, exposed throughout and used expressively to form a series of dramatic interlocking spaces. The cross-fertilisation of ideas that is present and encouraged on the courses also is enhanced through the additional inclusion of start-up incubator units for new businesses within the main building, blurring the boundary between the academic and the commercial. Client: Royal College of Art Architect: Haworth Tompkins Architects Contractor: Wates Construction, Wates Group Project manager: AECOM Davis Langdon LLP Quantity Surveyor: Gardiner & Theobald LLP Structural Engineer: Price & Myers LLP Services Engineer: Max Fordham LLP Planning: PFB Construction Management Services, DP9