Founded in the year 1263, Balliol is one of the oldest colleges at Oxford. To the east of its historic premises in Broad Street, around the lawn of a cricket pitch, an ambitious masterplan has been carried out which comprises eight blocks of student accommodation and a small sports pavilion. In order to alleviate the sense of repetition, the buildings alter their shapes, proportions, and orientations slightly, adapting with natural ease to the long eastern curve that borders the huge meadow, and blending into the existing complex, completed in the 1990s by the office of Richard MacCormac. At the same time, the apparently casual arrangement of the volumes seeks to frame different views of the landscape and define new quadrangles for encounters. In this effort to avoid homogeneity but without succumbing to a large repertoire of solutions, special attention is given to the composition of the elevations, built with slender brick buttresses that accentuate the ever-changing architecture of the scheme and allude to the Gothic style of the rest of the campus. Inside, the rooms are arranged around social spaces, with circulation elements conducive to unplanned social interaction...[+]