Hare's breadth.

A new centre for studying Islamic art adds greatly to both the academic power of London's School of Oriental and African Studies and the quality of the university campus.

The new Islamic Arts Centre for London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) is a good deal more complicated than it appears to be. The building has five or six primary functions contained within the rather non-committal exterior: the long block that runs along the north-west side of the site parallel to the main SOAS building contains a 300 seat lecture theatre in the basement, a floor of informal social and academic spaces at entrance level, then two floors of seminar rooms, above which are a couple more levels of offices for the academic staff. The wing that runs at right-angles to this one contains the galleries, with the permanent collection on the ground floor and the loan gallery occupying part of this level and the basement. Above the galleries are the offices and workshops of the curators disposed round an Islamic garden. At the joint which connects the two limbs is the entrance hall, a large tall square balconied volume crowned by a drum containing an inverse oculus (the centre is opaque and surrounded by a generous ring of glass).

The centre takes the note for its outer walls from the immediately adjacent terrace that forms the end of the south-west side of Russell Square, the place which stopped the southwards destructive march of London University into the fragile Georgian fabric of Bloomsbury. The site was vacant for many years, and when Nicholas Hare was asked to make the new building, the university's priorities had changed to such an extent that retention and completion of the terrace was one of the prime intentions of the design. There had been a gap site at the end of the terrace since it was bombed during the War. The new building's presence will normally first be noticed by most people here, where its short side butts up against the Georgian houses. The new building is made in soft pink brick which contrasts with the buff stocks of the old buildings but is very similar to the facing bricks of the SOAS building itself and to those of 30 Russsell Square at the other end of the terrace, which as Hare remarks, becomes contained between two symmetrical pink book-ends, each of rather larger scale than the Georgian houses.

Hare takes some of his key regulating lines from the terrace: window head heights and the cornice. (To ensure that the latter retains continuity, the top storey of the new building is drawn back from the brick facade and made almost neutral by continuous glazing under a wafer-thin flat roof.) But while the building is sympathetic to its neighbours, there is no attempt to ape them or make a neo-Georgian facade. For one thing this is an educational establishment and not a house, so that the windows have been made bigger than the neighbouring domestic ones to ensure an egalitarian distribution of daylight in the interior (charming as Georgian proportions and solid-to-void ratios are, they do not generate a very even flow of light). And the method of using bricks is quite different, with solid Flemish-bonded piers rising the full height of the building. Between them, the window openings are made with massive, almost Roman, flatbrick arches over lead-clad stainless-steel frames that have hardwood opening lights. When the building turns the corner to face SOAS, the constructional system carries on, with the piers spaced rather further apart, generating an early-nineteenth century industrial feel. (I do not mean this in a derogatory way: it has some of the noble, urbane pragmatism of Schinkel's sadly lost Berlin Bauschule, which itself took so much from the mills of the British Industrial Revolution.)

The teaching accommodation ends at the caesura of the recessed full-height lead-on-stainless-steel glazing of the main stair which separates the wing from the honorific scale of the entrance. The height of the inner volume is expressed outside and the drum can be seen emerging from the square brick block which contains it. The glass entrance screen is reached up a shallow flight of steps. Two round columns of reconstructed stone prop a lintel in the same material, making a shallow porch which addresses the entrance of SOAS across what Hare calls the 'precinct'. This is a real triumph for the architect, who has persuaded the university to convert what was a tatty bit of tarmac car park into an agreeable paved tree-lined walk that gives the SOAS complex a feeling of continuity, and the university (too often Gradgrindian when it thinks no-one is looking) a much-needed sense of urbanity and continuity with the surrounding Georgian fabric. The final public face of the Islamic Arts Centre fronts the tree-shaded lawn contained by the northern part of Charles Holden's '30s Senate House. There is a possibility that this building may one day be extended to enclose the lawn as an internal court. If this happens, Hare's centre will face the back of the new building across a narrow walk, so partly for this reason, he has made the gallery wing virtually blank on this side, with openings only at the upper level to illuminate the curators' premises and give views out from the secret garden.

Returning to the entrance, once through the glass screen you come into the box that surrounds the drum, which both draws the eye upwards to the light, and you forward into its volume before you come to the glass doors that are constrained between the porter's booth and the shop. Beyond them are the galleries. The first space houses the small but impressive permanent collection under a shallow up-lit vault. Beyond are the sliding screens that separate the permanent collection from the fragment of the loan gallery at this level.

To the right is one of the most magical moves in the building: a long stair goes down to the main loan exhibition area in the basement (a double-vaulted space with structural warm red bricks exposed on the soffits of the shallow curves). The up flights from the entrance level lead to the garden and the curators' department. The stairs rise and descend in a thin top-lit slot, which is separated from the permanent gallery by a row of white square columns, so that otherwise enclosed space is given further dimensions by the verticality of the slot and by contact with the outside world offered by constantly changing light coming from above.

The garden over the gallery is an unexpected delight. The long stair leads you up to an arcade surrounding a space modelled in miniature on the Islamic patterns of Granada's Generalife, with geometric pools and central canal surrounded by greenery that will presumably become more robust and part of the building as it matures. The curator is probably the luckiest person in the building, for the office that the holder enjoys looks out down the axis of the rill and pools to the doors of the drum that lead to the balcony, off which opens the little library.

From this level, a few steps lead down to the first floor of the teaching wing. It must be admitted that the contrast between the garden and the drum with the double-banked corridor of teaching rooms is a bit bathetic. The second floor of the wing is similar to the first - workmanlike enough, but rather dull. But the upper two floors are much better; the offices need a shallower depth than the teaching rooms below, and this has allowed a roof-lit slot to penetrate both levels bringing light to the double-banked corridors.

The rest of the story is easily told. If you had turned left instead of going straight on at the entrance drum, you would have come to the communal areas of the ground floor (cafe and seminar rooms) linked in enfilade. The lecture theatre in the basement is usually reached down a rather unceremonial dog-leg stair. But it has a foyer that echoes the geometry of the drum above, and for special occasions, it can be linked to the lower level of the loan gallery to form an impressive formal academic suite.

As a whole, the Islamic Arts Centre creates a new sense of identity in the university, and sets a standard of building and placemaking which that organisation has desperately needed for many years. P.D.