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by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios
The Atlas belongs to the trending typology of the student residential tower. It responds to the urban heritage of its London location, and its rigorous geometry efficiently enables accommodation on a mass scale. Words by Herbert Wright
There was a big surprise in Chicago in 2010 when the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat handed out awards for the year's best skyscrapers. The world's tallest, the Burj Khalifa, won in the category of Global Icon, but scooping the Best Overall award was Broadcasting Place in Leeds, designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCBStudios). It has a comparatively modest corten steel-clad tower, rising just 22 storeys and full of student flats. It was the start of a new typology that is now trending across the UK - the student residential tower - and, has since spread as far as New York and Melbourne. FCBStudios' latest example is The Atlas in Vauxhall, London, and just like their pioneering Leeds tower, cladding and form are what make the 96.5m-high podium-andtower composition stand out.
Before entering The Atlas, we could ask why is the skyscraper the new college dorm? Land is a tight resource, driving maximum return for a plot. Piling up students in multilevel bunk beds isn't an option - today, they expect privacy and an en-suite bathroom. The answer, as with offices or flats, is building upwards. Why didn't anyone think of high-rise college dorms before? First, the UK's student population has exploded since the Sixties' wave of new universities (usually built in the brutalist style). In 1971, there were 640,000 students in the UK according to the Office for National Statistics; in 2016, there were 1.84 million. And in the Sixties, cities were decentralising and expansive new campuses were built away from their centres. Today, the urban context of colleges in cities like London or...