Oxford’s new £185m humanities hub is polished, refined … and funded by a Trump ally | Architecture

When the wealthy Paduan banker Enrico Scrovegni commissioned the building of his eponymous chapel in the 14th century, he made sure that he was immortalised in the lavish frescoes adorning its interior. Florentine artist Giotto depicted Scrovegni, clad in robes of penitential violet, holding up a model of his chapel as a devotional offering. Just beyond Scrovegni’s eyeline, in a tableau of the Last Judgment, cavorting demons consign sinners to hell, a fate he presumably sought to avoid through his earthly largesse.

Donors and patrons have always insinuated themselves into art and architecture – whether in name or depiction – reminding onlookers of them and their piety and munificence. The image of Scrovegni and his chapel reverberates across the centuries in the portrait of American private equity mogul Stephen A Schwarzman – another man of wealth and taste – which presides discreetly over Oxford University’s new Centre for the Humanities. Named after and bankrolled by Schwarzman to the tune of £185m, it is the largest single gift since the Renaissance.

Here, the fixed-in-time image of the donor is a soft-focused, chocolate box confection showing Schwarzman in dappled sunlight, smiling benignly, as well he might: his net worth in 2026, according to Bloomberg, is £32bn. This has enabled him to gild his reputation through the usual rich man’s philanthropy, but Blackstone boss Schwarzman is also a Trump ally, advising on policy, providing funding for election campaigns and, latterly, donating to the construction of Trump’s controversial new White House ballroom-cum-bunker, now rising over the ruins of the East Wing.

So, aside from the portrait and his name tastefully chiselled across the door, how much bang has Mr Schwarzman got for his buck? Billed as Oxford’s largest and most programmatically ambitious academic project, the Schwarzman Centre fairly packs it in, yoking together seven humanities faculties, along with a 500-seat concert hall, a 250-seat theatre, a black-box immersive performance space, a white-box exhibition gallery, a dance studio, a cinema and a museum to house the Bate Collection of historic musical instruments, featuring everything from crumhorns to Javanese gamelans. The building also hosts the Institute for Ethics in AI, the Oxford Internet Institute and the new Bodleian Humanities Library.

Yet from the outside there’s little sense of this rich cacophony as most of it has had to be bunkered below ground. Oxford’s planners take understandable pains to preserve the city’s cherished skyline and limit the height of new buildings. So what greets the scholar or visitor is a surprisingly humdrum and sprawling four-storey block, its main north and south facades dignified by creamy Clipsham, the historic “Oxford” stone employed on college buildings since time immemorial.

Hopkins Architects, who won a design competition in 2020, have a reputation for what might be described as the “Jaguar dashboard” school of architecture: polished, refined, deftly synthesising tradition and modernity, always impeccably constructed. Yet here, for all its carefully composed detailing and incorporation of high-end materials, the stripped classicism of the Schwarzman comes across as somewhat bland and bloodless.

The idea of a humanities super-building has been at least 50 years in gestation, periodically foundering for lack of land and funding until Schwarzman rode to the rescue. The site lies in what has been rebadged as the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, formerly the gardens between the old Radcliffe Infirmary and the eccentric period piece of the Radcliffe Observatory, James Wyatt’s 18th-century reboot of the Tower of the Winds in Athens’ Roman agora.

With the gardens lost over time to a low-quality hospital expansion, the university acquired the entire infirmary site in 2007 and cleared it for development. Over time, it has been populated by a clutch of statement buildings, all resolutely ignoring each other. A case in point is the Blavatnik School of Government, designed by the Swiss partnership of Herzog & de Meuron, which resembles a tottering pile of CDs, and is now ageing like milk. Enter the Schwarzman, as the largest and latest interloper, coolly aloof with its rational geometry, deeply incised windows and modest arched loggia. Yet while there is probably something to be said for a strategy of formal reticence – the Schwarzman as the calm eye of a hectic architectural storm – there’s a fine line between formal reticence and milchwasser insipidness.

It has a big job to do, bringing together people and facilities previously dispersed in an array of accommodation, not always in the most salubrious locales. “History of Art was in rented offices above a Pure Gym round the back of Sainsbury’s,” recalls Prof William Whyte, who project-managed the scheme for the university. Not exactly dreaming spires. “And because all these buildings were horrible, they were always empty.”

Combining academic and civic functions, performance spaces do double duty as faculty lecture halls. The building welcomed students and staff last September and has had a chance to bed in before now being formally opened to the public. “Our great fear was we’d build this and it would be empty,” says Whyte. “And what was glorious was that when we opened it, it was full.”

In some ways, this is hardly surprising, as at its heart is the set-piece space of the Great Hall, a four-storey atrium crowned by a triple-glazed polyhedral dome. Light percolates through a secondary octagonal construction of giant slatted oak “petals” which flare out like an exploding timber artichoke. In experimental terms, it certainly beats offices above a Pure Gym.

With its lashings of spatial drama, the Great Hall is the centrifugal force around which the groves of academe whirl, with the libraries and seminar rooms, staff offices and study spaces. Students throng its galleries, glued to laptops or quietly conversing. But at ground level, it also forms a new public room, likened to an Oxford quad reconceptualised for the modern era without the arcane prohibitions. Anyone can wander through, sit and grab a coffee, under the beatific gaze of Mr Schwarzman.

Below ground is the subterranean labyrinth of assorted performance spaces, each with a distinct character, from intimate black box to the more regal confines of the 500-seat concert hall, a heroically proportioned space lined with oak panels. The effect is rather like being inside a musical instrument, with shades of the statement auditorium that Hopkins designed for Glyndebourne, now over 30 years ago.

It’s also the world’s first concert hall to attain Passivhaus certification, a feat that extends to the rest of the building. Essentially, the Schwarzman has been designed to achieve an exacting level of low-energy construction, which will reduce its future energy consumption. Performance monitoring over the winter showed that the building’s heating system requires around half the energy of a similar non-Passivhaus structure.

Beyond the imperative to reduce energy, there is a broader civic ambition to dissolve boundaries between town and gown through an extensive public programme of culture, from classical concerts to theatre, dance, talks and art. Inaugural events will feature Cynthia Erivo, Nitin Sawhney, Brian Eno and Kae Tempest, among others, and two major themed seasons will explore the legacy of the 1776 US Declaration of Independence and aspects of utopian thinking. The expectation is that the Schwarzman will evolve into a cultural heavy hitter and add lustre to Oxford’s already pretty lustrous milieu.

Where Enrico Scrovegni offered up a chapel 700 years ago, Stephen Schwarzman has sought to propitiate more worldly and more fickle deities, bringing the saga of Oxford University’s humanities building to a long-awaited conclusion. But in their respective acts of patronage, separated by centuries, both men could be said to have had an eye on immortality.