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Prince’s Gardens is an 1840s square in South Kensington, London. When Imperial College decided to replace its run-down 1960s student accommodation there, it was working to exacting standards and under great time pressure.
The project was in phases: the Southside residences, 425 bedspaces, a health centre, dental centre and student social space, and Eastside, with 460 bedspaces and other communal areas.
It was important to Imperial College that its buildings were of a ‘listable’ quality, befitting the grandeur of its location within the Knightsbridge Conservation Area. The design respected the original colour palette and made clever use of façade panels, creating sustainable and unmistakeably modern buildings which nevertheless maintain the scale and proportion of the original square.
An initial three-year construction programme was compressed to two years, and lessons learnt from the first phase meant that Eastside went on to be completed three weeks ahead of schedule.
This achievement was partly down to an imaginative procurement strategy, where a design and build single-stage tender with verification allowed competition between contractors through the verification stage, alongside design completion.
"A model of efficient economy and efficient delivery."