British practice John McAslan + Partners has completed the transformation and extension of Osney Power Station, a disused Victorian industrial building in Oxford, for the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.
The project creates learning areas and accommodation within the former power station, which opened in 1892 as Oxford’s first electrical generating plant. The intervention gives an obsolete piece of infrastructure a new institutional role while retaining its connection to the city’s industrial history.
According to Dezeen’s report on the project, the architects restored the building’s brick façades. The station’s upper levels are distinguished by metal cladding, setting newer elements against the retained masonry shell.
The scheme adds to a growing body of adaptive-reuse work in which historic utility buildings are repurposed rather than replaced. For property and urban-development observers, the Oxford project illustrates how a heritage structure can support contemporary educational uses while preserving visible evidence of its original purpose.