Case Study - Chancellor's Court

University of Leeds

Leeds, UK

The precinct of new buildings designed for the University of Leeds by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon occupies a site which slopes away to the south of the main university campus. As one of the ‘Civic’ universities, Leeds is classified amongst other urban universities founded at the turn of the twentieth century within large, prosperous cities, such as Liverpool and Birmingham. Its original campus, atop a hill in the city centre, comprises a scattering of buildings informally aggregated around the central Art Deco Parkinson Building, the figurehead of a sprawling structure of various styles which encompasses the university’s most prestigious buildings.

The ad hocism, and lack of overall plan, concerning the physical layout of university buildings is undoubtedly an anathema to the ethos of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon - the architects - whose approach to urbanism is based on the logical organisation of a multitude of separate parts configured as a coherent whole. This was an approach to urban design which they first proposed as part of their entry to the Churchill College competition in Cambridge, and later advanced in the renowned Barbican Estate, for a bombed site in the City of London. As part of the former, the architects surpassed the competition brief in proposing the consolidation of a number of newly founded colleges into a new collegiate nucleus outside the historic centre of Cambridge. In opposition to their fellow competitor’s trend towards isolating their proposals at the centre of the competition site, analogising their entries to medieval fortifications; Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s proposal instead created a common ground shared by the nascent colleges: a wide precinct for public and collegiate members alike. In their proposal for a generous pedestrian plaza serving the new colleges and the citizens of Cambridge, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon overturned the sacrosanct realm of collegiate introversion in favour of a democratised academic environment, generating the physical conditions for a meaningful interface between numerous private colleges and the public realm.

Whilst the architect’s proposal for Churchill College was not selected and therefore unrealised, the ideas of public space in the private university estate was to be actualised elsewhere, as an extension of the University of Leeds. If the architects overturned the typically inward-looking Cambridge college in their Churchill College proposal, they too resisted the institutional nature of the Leeds campus in their built designs for the university. Where the pre-existing condition of the University of Leeds campus was defined by a unorganised mass of significant buildings compacted together into a dense plan, the new university was to be characterised as a comprehensively planned precinct foregrounded by monumental new buildings, with proper distance given from more muted background buildings. Significant buildings in the plan were to be given a meaningful setting in relation to new public spaces and other buildings, contrary to the historic campus, where a clear urban hierarchy of new buildings and spaces would bring order from the chaotic historic campus.

Chamberlin, Powell and Bon exemplify the approach of modernist architects to making space in the city. Reordering a previously disorganised urban patchwork in favour of a clearly defined, hierarchical sequence of spaces, modernist design aimed for a fully-integrated urban solution to unplanned cities, capable of reorienting and improving man’s position in society. Perhaps the archetypal spatial form capable of this edifying principle is the form of the precinct, combined with the most elevated means to this enlightenment: the university. The urban university was a fecund starting point for the architects, presenting possibilities unavailable in earlier forms of university - such as the Oxbridge colleges or even the Plateglass Universities, closed against or built outside historic towns. The potential for an open civic engagement here, in an urban milieu, was to be captured in the remarkable form of the new University of Leeds campus as a public precinct; a planned interface heightening the twin conditions of campus and city.

the urbanism of the campus

The campus extension is laid out on cardinal axes, bisecting one another at a perpendicular crossing which forms the nucleus of the new campus, extending due North-South and East-West respectively. The basic diagram of the campus plan extends from these two axes, one of which forms a linear spine defined by strong horizontal lineaments along a single uninterrupted teaching building (E-W), the other, perpendicular to this axis, ascends the dramatic topography to the old campus up grand flights of stairs, stepped in plan and section, passing through more intimate squares and enclosed courts (N-S). One axis is characterised by the unyielding linearity of the teaching building, forming a groundscraper, and the other is characterised by exceptional pavilion buildings which converge on the crossing of axes. In order to eschew total regularity of the plan, the axes are offset where they meet to form a ‘pinwheel’ plan radiating from a raised plaza, which acts as a centripetal point for the campus extension, and forming a new campus centre ipso facto.

The branch from old campus centre to new campus extension emulates the ground plan of the former as a scattering of individual buildings, gradating as one approaches the new centre into a more formal ensemble of modernist scenography. From this approach, the architects exploit the change in topography, which falls away dramatically towards the campus extension. Two routes become available. First; the option to descend with the slope leads down a series of wide outdoor stairs and plateaus towards the lecture room building on the main plaza, alternatively; the option to follow an internal horizontal corridor culminates in a network of elevated pedestrian bridges as the ground falls away below.

Internal corridor and external terrain superimpose to form a three dimensional network of routes around the campus, creating an efficient horizontal datum for circulation - a modern Vasari Corridor - around the campus megastructure and mastering the topographical shift. All routes, both internal and external, coincide on the lecture room block. This clever building, the Roger Stevens Building, gathers all the incoming passages at their various levels and internalises them into an internal topography of staircases, forming a fulcrum for movement around the campus. The building draws together the circulatory strands and masterfully combines the staircases with raked auditoria which form the building’s primary programme. In a motif of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s assembly buildings, the gradient of the stairs is aligned to the gradient of the auditoria, allowing each row of seating to be accessed directly from the flight of stairs outside the lecture theatre. The spatial dynamism of movement around the campus is captured in an architectural form which derives its expression from the internal disposition of raked lecture halls and staircases.

From the external forecourt, the Roger Stevens Building is a puzzle of interlocking forms and shifting levels, clearly an exception to the regulated and consistent architectural language of the teaching and research blocks. The outward building form is a morphological imprint of the internal stacking of theatres, at ground level the sloping soffit of the lowest auditoria are raised above the ground plane to form recessed entrances, and covered stairs and ramps to lower plazas. The architects elevate the lecture room building typology to generate a sculptural node intertwining the ceremonial and circulatory aspects of the campus.

If the Roger Stevens Building is an exception, the long linear perpendicular wings are the rule. The anomalous but highly specific form of the lecture theatre block is foregrounded against the more uniform treatment of departmental buildings whose regularity provides a framework for indeterminacy and expansion. A grid based cluster of four closely spaced columns is proliferated along the campus axes to form a consistent spatial order. The resulting tartan grid within teaching buildings creates large-span zones for inhabitation, supported by vertical and horizontal service runs contained within the narrow grid zone of the column clusters.

The clearest expression of the repetition of the column cluster module is the E.C Stoner Building, a 200m+ long block whose consistent tectonic order forms an adaptable armature for the variety of internal infilling required to support different departmental spaces within. Externally, the order of horizontal expansion is expressed by uninterrupted ribbon windows and concrete spandrels, with depth perception provided by regular paired beam ends which project to the face of the building like centimetre markings on a ruler. This was an architectural framework designed to accommodate expansion on both horizontal and vertical axes; in the case of the former, indicated by the blank gable end of the block which anticipates the continuation of the linear system, and in the case of the latter, by the spare ‘Joker’ floors above the occupied levels which could accommodate upward expansion of the academic programme.

The quiet ingenuity with which Chamberlin, Powell and Bon exploit the topography of the site with a singular architectonic system creates a dramatic urban ensemble of gardens, paved courts, and elevated pedestrian routes around an integrated megastructure. Whilst referred to as a campus extension, the precinct is - just as it was for their Churchill College competition submission - an extension of the city in a radical form of urbanism, providing publicly accessible spaces at the interface of public and private domains. However, the campus extension patently neither belongs to the ad hoc conglomerate of unplanned urbanism of the original University of Leeds campus, nor does it belong to the urban tissue of the city. The Campus extension, if you could call it such, is less of an extension and more so a new centre is its own right - comprehensively planned to resist the sprawling antecedent of the main campus. The Chamberlin, Powell and Bon campus can therefore be understood as a challenge to the main campus, and to the city, insofar as it rejects the aforementioned unplanned agglomerations and instead illustrates the urbanistic principle of rational organisation in an entity which can be understood as complete at any stage in its development.

The campus is a holistic megastructure designed with co-ordinated thinking and represents a negation of existing urban conditions. As an institutional environment which bears a relationship to the old campus and to the city, whilst simultaneously undermining those urban structures, the campus precinct can be understood as a ‘heterotopian’ space, capable of disrupting established urban environments through its spatial and societal alterity. In opposition to the spatially undisciplined main campus, the consciously ordered campus approximates an idealistically rendered view of urbanism as a paradigm for rational and comprehensive development. The setting of distinctive buildings in relation to background buildings mimics the form of the city, exceeding that form in the actualisation of that structure as part of a master-plan, realised in a single enterprise, and subject to a conceptual framework controlling future development. Where the Plateglass Universities studied in this series formed utopian environments, that is, ideal cities untempered by a potentially incompatible host city, the campus in the city is a heterotopia, that is, an environment consciously conceived to situate itself outside of the reality of the city, in an ideological environment of the archetypal space of edification: the precinctual university.

Case Study - University of Warwick

Coventry, UK

One of the lesser recognised new universities in architectural terms, the University of Warwick is also the most typically modernist in the layout of the plan on an architectural and urban scale according to a regular grid. Such was the intention of the original architects, Yorke Rosenberg Mardall (hereafter YRM), whose experience in designing large technical infrastructures, such as Gatwick airport, was applied to the task of organising a new university campus.

The original design plan, of which a small fraction was realised, differed from the more self-contained university megastructures such as UEA and Essex, where the campus was consolidated into a singular architectural form. In opposition to the comprehensive brutalist campuses whose forms inferred a potential additive expansion into landscape, a principled rationalist grid was employed as a universal framework, from the urban to the architectural, controlling future development on an orthogonal grid. Apparent at every scale, from the grid planning unit, to the 6m structural grid, to the grid elevation treatment, and even at the detail scale of the white tile grid, this unifying ordering device organised the campus into a totality based on an all-encompassing regulating system. The subsequent over-cladding of the white tiles, due to material defects, has limited this clarity of this effect and given the buildings a less refined appearance.

Initially, the campus at Warwick was to incorporate an extensive network of wide aerial pedestrian streets, raised over vehicular traffic below, which were to integrate the main academic buildings at first floor level, arranged along a principal circulatory spine. YRM’s original models and drawings show a pedestrian network connecting zoned building clusters, segregated from service roads and car parks at ground level. The logic of separation was taken further, to separate academic buildings from residential buildings. Mid rise tower blocks in dense clustered formations were located at the end of aerial pedways, towards the perimeter of the site, nevertheless, the student would not have to set foot on the ground in their route from their residential tower to the pedestrian spine, where larger academic buildings were arranged perpendicular to the main axis. The original scheme can be described as Bielefeld University superimposed onto Milton Keynes: a linear university domain raised above a grid of streets and parks at ground.

Whilst the enormous plan was never realised to anything near its planned extent, a number of key principles were retained; namely the clear zoning of academic and residential buildings and the grid-based organisation. However, most damaging to the campus plan was the omission of the elevated pedestrian plane at first floor level, resulting in a compromised arrangement which placed both pedestrians and vehicles at ground level. In opposition to the dominant trend for vertical separation of vehicles and pedestrians. The central axis aligning key academic buildings was retained at a much diminished scale, with the priority given to vehicular traffic, generating a contested relationship between primary building entrances and service roads, only one aerial pedway was built. In the absence of the raised pedestrian parade, the interface between departments is restricted and interdisciplinary communication impeded, resulting in the somewhat inferior regard granted to the Warwick campus in relation to the other Plateglass universities.

However, this outcome is hardly surprising, in light of the more specialised pedagogy pursued by the original university leaders. Where other new universities experimented with novel combinations of departments into larger schools, encouraged their students to undertake interdisciplinary studies, and overlapped academic and social lives in colleges, Warwick was to pursue no such integration. It was decided that ’the university will not attempt to interweave teaching with the units of social organisation which are proposed’, a distinction which explains the zoning of the site into defined sectors for residential and academic purposes. Students were to be housed in halls away from the academic site, and indeed the nomenclature ‘hall’ was eventually dropped due to its affiliation with the collegiate model of education.

If the map of learning pursued by Warwick was more straitjacket than its contemporaries, the rationalist architecture of YRM was to incorporate this pedagogical logic into physical form. Eugene Rosenberg of YRM insisted that ‘it will not be possible to give physical recognition to individual schools of studies in the plan’, a statement which resonates with the abstract appearance of the Warwick campus architecture, an uncompromising modernism organised by the isotropic application of the grid logic. Individuation of departments was to be resisted, and what little was built of the original campus is a monument to the serial application of a consistent spatial module. The geometry which has been applied at all levels had, in the architect’s minds, elicited a unified totality of a comprehensive campus based on the underlying order of the grid. However this rather doctrinaire rationalist modernism was already outmoded by the time the academic zone was nearing completion, and like many universities the architecture became a source of contention.

In the climate of student revolt in the late 1960s, the uniformity of the campus was interpreted as conformity on the part of the student body who, amongst other things, resisted the lack of social spaces at the university and the architectural expression of the campus. The inadequacy of existing social spaces, such as the ‘airport lounge’, had failed to generate a meaningful and comfortable social environment, compounded by the lack of a student union building. Following a period of unrest, both these issues were addressed, in the commission of a student union building and a distancing from the uncompromising rationalism of YRM’s architecture.

Later additions to the campus gravitated around YRM’s Rootes Hall, an array of halls of residence arranged in a zielenbau formation. The new precinct compensated for the lack of social and cultural buildings within the original phase, supplying an arts centre, gallery and student union building partially enclosing a wide plaza. The new buildings, dating from the 1970s, discard the universal grid of the YRM architecture in favour of dynamic agglomerative forms based on a triangulated ‘field theory’. For instance, the new student union is arranged by the overlapping of a secondary diagonal grid, whereby the superimposition of different spatial fields generates irregular geometries, in opposition to strict orthogonality of the preceding YRM scheme.

Two final points are worth mentioning concerning the Warwick University campus, the first being the distribution of art in relation to modernist architecture. Eugene Rosenberg was a believer in the reciprocity of art and architecture, and its societal value; a relationship enhanced by the abstract regularity of YRM’s architecture. Rosenberg, ‘architecture is enriched by art and that art has something to gain from its architectural setting’. The seriality of the YRM campus establishes a neutral canvas to the outdoor sculpture, inverting the white cube gallery setting containing art, into an outdoor setting of art set against white cube architecture. An extensive collection of site-specific artwork punctuates the spatial experience of the campus, creating an open-air sculpture park in dialogue with the campus architecture.

Perhaps more significant than the YRM campus in architectural terms is a small village of houses designed for visiting mathematicians by the practice HKPA. Employing an earthier new brutalist language of brick and concrete in comparison to the YRM white tile signature, this concentric collection of individual villas is ensconced at the perimeter of the site, surrounded by woodland. 6 houses united by a radiused brick wall encircle a copse of trees (now removed), creating an idyllic garden for peripatetic scholars. Here the totalising logic of the universal grid is fully rejected in favour of an introverted communitarian cluster, providing a more humanistic alternative to the potentially infinite modular system of the main university campus.

Case Study - University of Essex

Colchester, UK

The campus of the University of Essex, designed by Kenneth Capon of the Architects’ Co-Partnership, is acknowledged as one of the most paradigmatic of the Plateglass Universities in its espousal of modernist tenets and the ideals of the welfare state. The alignment of the ideology of the university, as set out by the inaugural Vice Chancellor Albert Sloman, with the architectural and urban concept is elaborated clearly at the campus of the University of Essex, where the campus was not so much designed as an institution, but as a new town.

The ‘map of learning’ which was to be vigorously pursued by the university founders at Essex was to not only provide the intellectual skills to a new technocratic elite - a British MIT - but also to forge, through a non-paternalistic model of residence, a ‘new man’ for the post-war era.

In a conviction shared with most other Plateglass Universities, rigid departmental hierarchies were to be resisted, with this conviction manifested in the architectural configuration of the campus. Collectively, the interdisciplinary atmosphere of collaborative learning and research, coupled with a self-determining sociological model, established the University of Essex as the most progressive and also rebellious of the new universities.

Built in a sloping valley in the picturesque Wivenhoe Park outside the historic town of Colchester, the University of Essex Campus is conceived as a self-sufficient new town in a bucolic, albeit artificial, landscape. Conceptually, the urban design of the campus consists of a series of elevated squares which step down the valley along the bowed axis of a pedestrian parade, a continuous teaching building spans the valley, turning back on itself to zig zag between the numerically-named squares. At the top of the valley, a man made lake is dammed by ‘Square 5’, or the library square, which terminates the route through the campus. Perpendicular axes radiate from the teaching wings which become linear routes between residential towers, set apart from the urban condition of the campus in a parkland setting.

Capon, of the Architects’ Co-Partnership, led the design of the campus in collaboration with the university founders and University Grants Committee adhering to the canons of modernist urbanism. The entire structure of the campus is, deceptively, a single building which returns on itself to wind up the valley to enclose squares and courts. Standalone monumental buildings serving core functions are the exception to the rule. Separate residential towers are arranged on a separate axis, whose distinct logic of the modernist tower-in-park typology distinguishes the realm of living from learning, despite their physical proximity.

Therefore, the campus can be divided into three architectural types, which form a set of elements for potential future expansion:

1. a tiered teaching framework intersected by a linear pedestrian parade

2. individual object buildings interspersed within the teaching wings

3. repeated student accommodation towers

The megastructure which houses the university’s teaching, recreation, and administrative functions forms the urban tissue of the campus and concentrates the vast majority of the university’s programme into one continuous structure. The scale of the megastructure is such that it transgresses the morphological boundaries between architectural entity and urban agglomeration, enclosing squares, courts, and capturing landscape in the splayed extension of its wings. Departments are assembled within the continuous mat building and linked by an internal network of corridors in such a way as to enable interdisciplinary connections, thus negating the silo-effect of segregated subjects, part of the innovative map of learning promoted by the new universities.

The mat building is ordered on a grid, which is pinched in plan to radiate outwards following the curve of the valley below. The subtle rotation of the grid bows the whole urban assemblage, and consequently creates a crescent shaped parade, which penetrates the teaching megastructure. This curvilinear axis through the centre of the campus is formed of five square, or trapezoidal piazze which descend the valley from the artificial lake at the top of the precinct down broad flights of steps. Each square exhibits minor variation in the overall architectural expression of the scheme: in addition to their prosaic nomenclature according to number, each square is differentiated by the colouration of spandrels in primary colours, the massing of the enclosing architecture to lend density around the square, and a unique geometric arrangement in each square.

The subtle modifications to each of the squares in the pedestrian precinct is evocative of Townscape planning ideals being promoted at the time, led by proponent Gordon Cullen. The urban pattern of squares and an enveloping dense urban tissue elicits references of hilltop citadels found in Italy or ancient Greek temple precincts. Each square is lined by colonnades, or arcades where retail units are present - creating the impression of a compact community. Indeed this ambition was explicit in the minds and words of the university founders and architects, where the absence of a student union was substituted for the ‘public life of a small university town’.

Situated within three sided courts which open onto the landscape are a series of ‘individual and nonconformist’ monuments, likened to jewels by Capon, which serve the university’s more dignified functions. These elements are freestanding objects in the landscape at the frayed thresholds to the campus proper, where it transitions into the verdure of the surrounding parkland, acting as gateways and significant markers between the residential towers and the campus megastructure. Shaped as hexagons, polygons and, latterly, ovals, these structures house key university functions such as lecture theatres, libraries and galleries according to their own unique geometric order. These constitute points of exception to the otherwise more homogenous urban fabric of the mat building and punctuate the pedestrian procession from parkland to the piazza.

The concept of the campus is based on the strict separation, and indeed elevation both literally and metaphorically, of the pedestrian versus the concealment of the vehicle. Capon exploits the topography of the valley to submerge vehicular and service access to the campus beneath the sequence of ascending squares in a service undercroft. The piazze above, which can therefore be accessed via bridge or at grade from the spurs which descend into the valley, assume an elevated position in the overall scheme. The relegation of the vehicle in relation to the pedestrian is another tenet of modernist urbanism, which is exemplified by the Essex campus in order to preserve a landscape prioritised for parkland and the pedestrian domain.

The final tenet of modernist architecture, and final building typology yet to be examined, is the student residence tower. The tower-in-park typology, usually proposed for inner-city areas, is modified here as a novel example in true parkland setting, whose novelty extends to its application in a university scenario. As the only Plateglass University to embrace high-rise living, the University of Essex was also embracing modern metropolitan lifestyles, resisting the both the collegiate, and corridor-based student residence models. Coupled with laissez-faire attitudes to social regulation, the towers provided the conditions for students to form small social units, and to define themselves as individuals as part of a larger student body.

At the University of Essex the design of the campus is closely aligned to the emancipatory and egalitarian project for a ‘post-institutional’ university. By designing the campus as an ideal new town, rather than an institution, the architects promoted a culture of communitarian living on one hand, whilst proposing a model city with broader implications for urbanism on the other. Achieving density through compact urban forms of the mat building and the tower block, whilst simultaneously intensifying both the pedestrian realm of the campus and bucolic condition of the estate, the University of Essex campus is an exemplar of modernist urban design and its synchronised view on society.

Postscript - an interesting archive documenting original architectural drawings and construction photographs can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/149590996@N07/page1