Tower and Town, May 2017

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At Home With Frodo Baggins

For Frodo Baggins there would be some familiarity in ascending from the deep chambers of the worm-like building. He would be further assured on sensing the diffused light emanating from the egg-white porthole leading to the rounded skylight. Yet reality attests that it is 2017 Oxford as I sit researching some archives under a porthole not in a Hobbit dwelling but within the Investcorp Building at St Antony’s College. Designed by the late architect Zaha Hadid the building imbues new world charm not through scale but rather through undulating minimalism and imaginative assertion of modernity. It says ‘I am the future’ through its cladding, yet it also says ‘I am at ease with the adjacent architecture of the past’. Hadid’s building was awarded the 2016 World Architecture Festival’s award for “Higher Education & Research – Completed Buildings”.

Raik Jarjis