Only a teenage student would think of the Luker Road campus as an old building, but it has a fair claim to be a historic one.

In the month the South Essex College building celebrates its 10th anniversary, one of its architects has been looking back at what he says was “a groundbreaking building then – and still is, a decade later.”

Andy Simons is one of the S’s in KSS, the architectural practice commissioned to design the new campus in 2003.

At the time, KSS had built up an expertise in football stadiums. Their portfolio includes Liverpool, Chelsea and Tottenham’s home grounds.

Now, for the first time, they imported some of the design principles, and also the glamour, of football architecture to an educational building.

Even before the first rough sketch, the college building was seen as an idea – andamessage.

Recalling his original brief, Andy says: “It had to appeal to the students. It had to be an apathy killer. They had to want to come back to it, or not to leave it in the first place.

“In the old college buildings, too many young people were leaving at lunchtime – if they came in at all in the first place.

They were going into town and not bothering to come back.

“The new building had to act as a visible message – ‘there is more to life than just hanging around the streets’. It had to say to them, ‘you have a life choice.

You can go off the rails, or you can acquire skills and move forward with your life’.”

A key part of the appeal was a large social space, flooded with light from the south (this was also an energy-saving measure).

At its core would be a food centre where the college could offer meals and snacks “at least competitive with what they could get in town at places like McDonald’s.”

In creating the huge open space demanded, along with a sense of lightness and airiness, the KSS team came up with a radical new vision. To the layman, their solution sounds like nothing so much as a series of giant balloons. Andy himself happily refers to the concept as “sausages, pumped up like a car tyre”. The result added a new silhouette to the Southend skyline.

The material chosen was Efte (ethylene tetrafluoroethylene), a strong, light, translucent fabric, able to stand the effects of the elements (not least sunshine) for, hopefully, decades.

In 2003, Efte had acquired a renowned showcase – the domes of the Eden Project, in Cornwall, where it was known as “cling film with attitude”. But it remained largely novel and untested outside the laboratory.

When KSS adopted it for the Luker Road site, its use in education, and for a town centre building, was groundbreaking.

The surface area involved was intimidating – 26,000 square metres.

“There was no template,” says Andy. “No precedent we could consult. We were making the template.”

Critics may claim the building is a bit puffed up. If so, they are absolutely right. The comparison with car tyres only goes so far.

Efte cushion domes have to be kept inflated by constant 24-hour pumping. “The pump unit is so small I don’t think many people are even aware of its existence,”

says Andy. In the event of a serious tear, or a power failure, the structure would only subside slowly, over a roughly six-hour period.

The other great innovation was to paint the sausages white – “an almost milky white”, as Andy puts it – to reduce glare and add to their sense of presence.

Aware of the impact the building would have on the town, the architects walked the streets of Southend, checking every conceivable sightline.

“Although it was obviously new and different, it couldn’t be allowed to overwhelm the existing townscape,” says Andy.

Revisiting the building ten years later, Andy believes the sausages “haven’t aged and haven’t dated”.

One person who definitely agrees is Carol Anson-Higgs, now the college’s vice principal for business development. Carol was on the college staff in 2003, and watched as the building rose up from the old rail station marshalling yards.

She says: “The new building created a powerful effect, and I think it was something everyone, students and staff, wanted to be part of. The college has been a successful, confident, expanding institution since 2004, and the Southend campus building has been a core part of that story.”

A key requirement for the building, says Carol, was flexibility. The days of rigid structures, both in terms of buildings and administration, had gone.

“We’ve had to be more responsive to constant change, and to the demands of business and employers,” says Carol. “We knew from the start the building would have to change as well. A key demand, from the start, was that it had to be as flexible as possible. It had to be adaptable to changing times and requirements.”

The college has indeed changed since 2004.

Academically, there has been a substantial growth in IT-related courses, andamajor emphasis on the demands of growing industries, such as logistics.

Much of what was originally open-plan teaching space has been converted to more traditional classroom-style teaching. “The building has proved well up to the demands placed on it,” says Carol.

Perhaps the best example of flexibility in action is the building’s most celebrated feature, the floating “Pod”

lecture theatre. “The request for a 250-seat, soundproof lecture theatre came quite late in the day,” says Andy.

Once again, the architects used radical imagination, rather than reaching for some established textbook. The solution, very daring in retrospect, was the selfcontained Performance Pod, poised above the atrium like an ostrich egg on steroids.

As with the cushion domes, the KSS team had to make up the rules for Pod building as they went along. “Andy says: “We usedamonocoque (self-supporting shell) structure, which we sprayed with concrete using a technique called Shotcrete.” The Pod was then painted a shameless red.

The Pod has been put to the most stringent test imaginable.

Andy says: “Lectures can carry on uninterrupted by the noise of 1,300 students heading for their lunch-break. I think we can say we got it right.”