BDP Transforms a Barren London Car Park into a Glowing Timber Staircase to Nowhere and Everywhere

Senate House is one of London's most imposing buildings: a Grade II* listed Art Deco tower designed by Charles Holden in 1929, rising like a limestone cliff above Bloomsbury. Its west side, however, had for years devolved into a windswept car park, a dead zone at odds with the building's civic ambitions. BDP was tasked not with erasing that condition permanently but with interrupting it, and the result is Stepped Pavilion, a 7.3-meter-tall timber and steel staircase that occupies the former parking forecourt with the directness of a stage set and the warmth of a living room.

What makes this project worth studying is its refusal to be precious. It is bright orange. It is temporary, designed to stay for a minimum of three years and then be unbolted, disassembled, and relocated. Its lighting comes entirely from repurposed, discontinued LED stock. And its spatial proposition is fundamentally simple: a broad public staircase you can sit on, walk over, and gather beneath. The pavilion is a counterpoint to Senate House's monumental permanence, a lightweight and deliberate act of impermanence that, paradoxically, gives the site more identity than the tower alone ever did.

A Bright Interruption in Stone and Limestone

The contrast between Holden's stepped-back stone tower and BDP's timber framework is the project's primary visual tension. Senate House operates through mass, symmetry, and vertical aspiration. The pavilion borrows the idea of the step, that most elementary of architectural moves, but strips it of weight. Seen from Malet Street, the timber lattice reads as a translucent filter laid against the building's limestone bulk, an almost textile quality set against geological permanence.

BDP chose orange as a signature color to signify opportunity, a deliberate break from the grey and cream palette of the institutional campus. It is a bold call, and it works precisely because it does not try to blend in. The pavilion announces itself as something other, something provisional, something that belongs to the students rather than to the institution's history.

Dual Aspect: Space Above and Shelter Below

The pavilion's cleverest move is its dual-aspect organization. The Spanish-style steps offer an open, sunlit gathering surface on top, while below them a sheltered zone creates usable space even in London's reliably grey weather. This is not a single-use object. The staircase is seating, lookout, and threshold all at once, while the undercroft provides shade, wind protection, and a more intimate atmosphere. Vertical slatted timber balustrades define the edges without closing them off, and planted beds soften the boundary between structure and ground.

Looking upward through the layered joists and beams, you get a cross-section of the construction logic: C24 softwood and European whitewood spanning between glulam members, connected with steel plates sized for easy disassembly. The structure is honest about its joints and its temporality. Nothing is hidden, and nothing pretends to be monumental.

Timber, Steel, and the Logic of Demountability

The pavilion sits on a base of steel beams leveling the former car park surface, anchored to concrete blocks. From there, everything is timber and bolted steel connections. The material strategy is driven by the requirement that the entire structure be fully reversible: every component can be unbolted, packed, and reassembled elsewhere. This is architecture designed for a second life, maybe a third, and the detailing reflects that ambition without sacrificing visual warmth.

At dusk, the integrated LED lighting transforms the structure into a lantern. All fittings are repurposed stock, uplighting the timber surfaces to minimize light pollution and cast a warm glow across the courtyard. The effect at twilight, when the timber framework glows against the darkening tower, is genuinely arresting. The pavilion becomes a beacon in a part of the campus that previously had none.

Landscape and the Softening of Institutional Ground

Wildflower gardens and plywood planters ring the structure, establishing a green buffer between the pavilion and the surrounding hardscape. It is a modest landscape intervention, but in a formerly barren car park, the presence of soil and planting matters. The existing concrete surface was retained and painted with a pattern designed by BDP, layering color onto a surface that once had none. Combined with the autumn canopy of existing trees framing views of the timber bridge, the site reads as a deliberate garden rather than a leftover.

The pavilion continues the symmetrical language of Senate House's horseshoe layout, positioning itself along the central axis and respecting the building's formal geometry even as it subverts its material logic. It is a rare example of a temporary structure that actually engages with its host building's compositional rules rather than ignoring them.

Plans and Drawings

The axonometric drawing reveals the pavilion's relationship to Senate House's courtyard wings, showing how the stepped form locks into the horseshoe plan and creates a public plaza scaled for gathering. The elevation drawing clarifies the angled profile of the street-level structure against the multi-story backdrop, while the concept sketch lays bare the sustainability thinking: annotations about solar potential, demountable connections, and reuse strategies. These drawings make visible the tension between the pavilion's casual, almost improvised appearance and the careful environmental logic underpinning every detail.

Why This Project Matters

Temporary architecture is easy to dismiss as event furniture, but the Stepped Pavilion demonstrates what happens when a temporary structure is given the same design attention as a permanent one. BDP has created an object that is simultaneously lightweight and spatially generous, colorful without being frivolous, and technically sophisticated in its demountability without wearing that sophistication on its sleeve. It takes a dead corner of one of London's most significant buildings and makes it the most active part of the campus.

More broadly, the project poses a useful question for universities everywhere sitting on underused forecourts and parking lots: what if the answer is not a new building but a large, bright, demountable staircase? The best temporary interventions change how people perceive a site permanently, even after the structure is gone. Stepped Pavilion has the character to do exactly that.

Stepped Pavilion, designed by BDP. Located at Senate House, London, United Kingdom. Completed in 2022. Height: 7.3 meters.

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