The Investcorp Center for the Middle East is located in a historic setting in the compound of St. Anthony's College to which it is assigned. These are the buildings of the 19th century, and the brutalist building of 1971 (all of them have the status of a monument), as well as a very demanding "neighbor" - a century-old sequoia, for which it was necessary to bend the western facade and install a special drainage system so that the roots of the tree receive enough moisture.
The construction site was only 1,500 m2, and the new building was not easy to fit into the dense ensemble of the college. So, from the west, the height of the Center corresponds to the low buildings in the Victorian style, and from the east, it managed to climb a little higher - thanks to its proximity to a larger brutalist structure. Although its formal design reflects the modern era, the building behaves modestly: the cladding of the roof and facades with polished stainless steel panels allows the Hadid building to gently reflect its surroundings, dissolving into it.
Inside, on an area of 1127 m2, there is a library and an archive with reading rooms, as well as a lecture hall with 117 seats: In recent years, the Center for the Middle East has become increasingly popular not only among researchers and students, but also among the general public, for which it is open many of his lectures and discussions.
The supporting structure of the building is made of concrete, while the floors are made of laminated veneer lumber. A significant part of the interior is illuminated through openings in the roof; oak wood was used in the decoration of the premises - as a decor or acoustic panels. The submerged lecture hall with a green roof is ventilated by a heat labyrinth, the same method used for the reading room. A geothermal heat pump is responsible for the temperature in the archive, which contains 400 collections of private documents and more than 100,000 photographs of the 19th and 21st centuries on the history of the Arab world, Iran, Israel and Turkey.
