worst student housing ever?

Hot on the tail of my previous post of the bestest student facilities, the UKs' Building Design Magazine is awarding its 2013 Carbuncle Cup to the latest student accommodation block at University Collage London. Officially the worst building in the UK! At least to one of the most widly read trade magazines.

Lurking behind a retained brick facade of a nineteenth-century warehouse on north London's Caledonian Road is described as a 'beached whale, trying to hide its copious grey flanks behind the dainty Victorian mask.' That is not the end of the slew of hilarious quotes from the Guardian article. I'm just gonna list them all below and you can make your own assessment.

"It utterly defies belief," says Islington councilor Paul Convery, who chaired the planning committee that refused Mortar Developments permission for the building in April 2010 – a decision that was overturned on appeal six months later. "Now that it's been erected, it slaps you in the face how totally wrong the building is."

"It's absolutely atrocious," says Hannah Webb of the UCL Students' Union. "Everyone deserves natural light, and students often use their rooms during the day for studying. It's just another disgraceful example of UCL trying to profit from its students, with no thought for their welfare."

"Daylight is not a luxury, it's a necessity," agrees Colum McGuire, vice president of the National Union of Students. "We wouldn't expect or accept windowless rooms for any other sector of society, and so there is absolutely no reason to think such provision is acceptable to students."

"For an institution steeped in culture, heritage and learning," wrote one enraged reader about Oxford University, "they've proved themselves to be a bunch of crass money-grubbing philistines. With tin ears to the howls of public outrage."

It reads like the Daily Hate, I mean the Daily Mail. Unlike the Daily Mail I kind of agree with most if it. Actually all of it, it's a shit show. It is retarded that the windows are out of sync with the existing facades windows, meaning that the rooms are looking out on to a one meatier away brick wall.

So how does a building that cost £18m and supposedly is investing in the future minds of Britain get away with inadequate daylight, poor outlook and lack of privacy. That's only at the front of the building, around the back, where the building greets the adjacent train line, bedrooms face their neighbors' windows as close as five meters away – in a borough where the minimal residential overlooking distance is 18 meters.

Islington initially refused permission not only on grounds of excessive scale, massing, bulk and "incoherent elevation treatment" and possibly general common since. But this list of horrors was casually batted aside by the planning inspector, on the grounds that the rooms' main function would be for sleeping, "due to intensive daytime activities taking place at the university campus". The lack of privacy, daylight and standard residential amenity, he therefore concluded, was "unlikely to be perceived as overly oppressive by the occupiers". Could this guy be a total wank or is he getting a brown envelope from somewhere? Maybe he shouldn't judge everyone student like himself.

Either way, this affront to all that is decent. Designed by Stephen George and Partners - who also won the Carbuncle Cup in 2007 for its similarly grim Opal Court housing development in Leicester - gets away with it because it falls into the same use class as hotels and guest houses (C1). Meaning that in the light of the supposed limited occupation of these buildings, these sorts of developments are exempt from many of the codes and standards that govern normal residential dwellings (C3) including basic accessible spaces, daylight and acoustics. While the developer is usually excused from these gross defects by professing to provide an affordable housing contribution. Although I don't know how 'affordable' £730 per month for this hole for most people. All this makes student housing an attractive proposition for ruthless disinterested faceless investors. Piled high and sold not-so-cheap, building student silos is a lucrative business that don't give two tugs of a dead dogs dick about other peoples basic human aspirations, let alone design or their personal and professional integrity.

With pressure to provide rooms for climbing numbers of students, in schools that have no funding, such schemes are increasingly waved through planning, allowing cynical developers to duck under the usual rules, deface my profession and hurt the prospects or our future minds.

Okay, love I need to calm down. Turn to the crossword.