Case Study - Sidgwick Site

University of Cambridge

Cambridge, UK

Owing to the dispersed pattern of higher education as delivered at the University of Cambridge, there is no central campus for teaching, instead direct tuition is provided within colleges and at departments distributed around the city. Unlike the centralised model of teaching familiar to modern universities, i.e collective mass learning environments at a compact campus, the Oxbridge model relies on one-to-one supervisions and small seminar groups. This model pervades today, however, post-war alterations to higher education priorities and university expansion necessitated a concentrated environment for the university’s arts and humanities faculties. Thus the Sidgwick Site was established on the far side of the river Cam from the historic colleges as a new campus for the collegiate university.

The Sidgwick Site, built to a masterplan from Casson and Conder, began work in 1952 as a framework containing faculty buildings, staff offices and lecture halls, amongst some recreation amenities. The ‘controlling framework’ which was to guide later development of individual buildings is based on typology of the Cambridge college, whose urban form is derived from the individual arrangement of linear ranges around large rectangular courts. The Sidgwick Site masterplan shows symptoms of this ‘courtyarditis’, a label applied to the later Churchill College Competition, also in Cambridge, where most entrants returned to the familiar collegiate pattern of linked quadrangular courts to symbolise the space of academia.

Despite the opportunity and the conditions to propose an ideal geometric layout over the site, (the site consisted of flat former agricultural land) Casson and Conder deliberately eschewed any formal axes or frontal vistas typically associated with new build campuses. Their morphological mutation of the Cambridge college type turned out to be particularly modern in its urban form, at a time when Cambridge was only just turning to reluctantly accept modernism.

In place of completely contained quadrangles, the organisation of linear blocks cranked at 90 degrees in such a way that blocks would each partially enclose courts enabled the college court arrangement without any single structure fully closing the quadrangle. As such, multiple architecturally individuated buildings contribute towards making a court as part of a heterogenous environment. Smaller special buildings are points of exception within the orthogonal layout of linear blocks. Lecture buildings form freestanding objects in space, providing deviations in the logic of the plan, they are differentiated by sculpted silvery hats in contrast to the dark brick and concrete masses of the faculty buildings.

At the Sidgwick Site the ground plane is preserved as a precinct formed of multiple scales, types and character of courts raised atop a permeable pedestrian plinth. Whilst the original masterplan inferred a mat building configuration of closely bounded spaces typical of a Cambridge college, the raising of the faculty buildings to establish a continuous plane enables the simultaneous enclosure of the court, and the extension of the public realm beneath the blocks. The U-shaped Raised Faculty Building forms three sides of a main court whilst creating an open arcade of massive concrete piloti which act as a filter between the interior of the court and the extension of the continuous ground plane beneath.

The immense main court is linked on a diagonal axis to a series of gradated courts which diminish in scale to form verdant courts on an intimate scale. These courts are formed by the orthogonal arrangement of linear buildings which appear to slip past each other and casually abut one another, creating pockets with an altogether more incidental spatial character. The rather acropolitan plateau which the Raised Faculty Building dominates steps down to a series of small courts. Proceeding from one court to the next the pedestrian is funnelled through a sequence of porches and covered arcades at the entrances to each building, which creates a rhythm of compression and release.

The unimpeded podium on which the faculty buildings are arranged elevates the public dimension of the campus and restricts vehicles to the perimeter creating an academic precinct as a place apart. The containment of the courtyard type, coupled with the porosity of the ground plane enable situational space without compromising the accessibility of the campus, dissolving the insularity associated with the Cambridge college. Here the academic preserve is made urban by virtue of its elevation of the pedestrian.

Unfortunately, only the south area was completed according to the Casson and Conder framework and later buildings were not aligned to the urban concept initially established. The urban pattern of concatenated courts radiating from the focal main court is lost in the ill-defined space between individual monumental buildings by later architects. The coherence and sense of enclosure of the original south section of the Sidgwick Site diminishes amongst more recent buildings of fragmented orientation and morphology whose dissonance undermines the totality of the campus as a comprehensively conceived academic environment.

Case study - UEA

University of East Anglia

Norwich, UK

I recently visited one of the 7 ‘plateglass’ universities located outside the historic city of Norwich. The campus of the University of East Anglia is a comprehensive and self-sustaining institution located on the city fringe, something of an autonomous citadel in a suburban/pastoral condition.

Emerging from an era of unprecedented expansion and ambition in the planning of new universities, UEA represents one exemplar of a total environment - meaning a newly founded academic institution with a simultaneously realised campus, where the development of one would reciprocally inform the development of the other.

The modernist affixation with total planning solutions issued from a belief that only through concerted thinking on a macro scale that the issues facing postwar society could be resolved. In the case of the new universities this belief signified a departure from the ad hocism which afflicted the redbrick universities and oxbridge, where little consideration was given to the overall strategy and structure of the university campus, only the imminent needs of the university.

The new universities were an antidote to this model of thinking, instead proposing fully masterplanned miniature cities with advance plans for expansion and joined up to simultaneous developments in the pedagogy of the nascent university.

The emphasis was on the campus as a singular coherent entity in direct counterposition to the redbrick model. Moreover, in addition to the campus as a foil to the redbrick type in architectural and urban terms, the plateglass universities were forged in a postwar emancipatory era of state-funded higher education, and therefore sought to reverse the elitism which pervaded prewar higher education.

This context manifested a remarkable campus at UEA. Designed by Denys Lasdun in concert with the university founders, an Academic Planning Board (APB) of the University Grants Committee (representing Whitehall), prospective academics and local stakeholders, UEA like its plateglass contemporaries represents a broader spectrum of society in its cultivation from national politics to local community.

Notwithstanding this broader engagement, the plateglass universities were all built on greenfield sites at the peripheries of historic towns, enabling their realisation as autonomous enclaves for academic pursuit, rather than fully integrated campuses.

UEA was built on a sloping site west of Norwich city centre, even today the campus has yet to be encroached upon by the city around. The campus, as realised, represents the first stages of a potentially extendable framework for expansion, but still - in its partial completion - is perceptible as a complete campus. It is a gestalt, despite unrealised further phases.

The challenge of the plateglass universities were numerous. In urban terms, the campuses had to appear to be complete for the arrival of the first cohort to uphold a semblance of longevity, whilst also functioning as a self-sustaining system even whilst construction was underway on later phases.

In the design for UEA, there are a number of architectural components which form a framework for development. This kit of parts consists of four elements:

1. Linear spine building for teaching

2. Cellular Ziggurat buildings for accommodation

3. Freestanding buildings housing key extra-curricular functions (library, union, etc)

4. Elevated aerial pedways for circulation

The main buildings are clustered around a central amphitheatre in a more amorphous arrangement, imitating a nucleated piazza and adhering to fashionable townscape principles. Whilst the linear spine buildings and ziggurat buildings form two parallel wings which branch out from the amphitheatre and bow around to bracket a large prairie lawn and lake to the south.

The central amphitheatre evokes something of a modernist hill town, with tiered platforms stepping from the main entrance axis of the university, down to a south facing bowl enveloped by key communal buildings. This amphitheatre is the fulcrum of university life, forming a nexus for the student’s needs and a place for encounter.

Zoned apart from this precinct is the teaching spine and living ziggurats, which project from the centre along radial arms. Teaching and living run roughly parallel in tendrils out from the centre maintaining an unusual programmatic proximity to one another. In an era when zoning of functions was considered the paragon of enlightened planning, the close proximity of life and labour is surprising, notwithstanding their separation by a service road between the two wings.

Teaching, accommodated in the canted teaching spine, is integrated into the parallel student accommodation in the famous ziggurats by raised aerial platforms and pedways, which form an outdoor elevated concourse for circulation. Adhering to another canon of modernist planning - the separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic - the pedways are raised high above the service streets below, favouring the former. As consequence most teaching levels are accessed from the first floor, whilst the living accommodation in the ziggurats is accessed from a staircase descending into the building from the top floor.

The ziggurats, perhaps the most memorable form, are organised on a 45 degree axis (a Lasdun motif) with a staircase which steps down with the section to give access into the student rooms. The staircase model, pervasive at oxbridge, provides recognisable familiar social units with which a student can affiliate with a coterminous spatial limit. Individual ziggurats are aggregated into long ranges of which two were realised, forming a man made outcrop at the crest of an expansive lawn.

By employing a system of repetitive or extendable parts Lasdun incorporates a logic for expansion. The idea driving which would mean that future additions did not regress to ad hocism but could be seamlessly incorporated into the concept of the campus without undermining its integrity. In theory, the number of ziggurats could proliferate and the length of the teaching spine elongate without eroding the coherent image of the campus.

According to the original masterplan, the wings of ziggurats were serried so that they would converge on the established nucleus of the campus, rather than extend indefinitely outward. This was a concept driving the masterplan of the ‘five minute university’ where the urban form of the campus could be so compact as to ensure the centre could be reached on foot in five minutes.

This will - to a compact university - brings us back to the original objectives of the plateglass campuses. To resist the incrementalism of the redbrick with a strategy for future expansion, whilst also creating an identifiable and condensed microcosm, were paradigmatic goals of the postwar university campus.

Historic literature focus

Cambridge, UK

I am currently focusing my readings around expansion in Post-war Higher Education and the resulting era of 'Utopianist' university campuses spawned out of varied political motivators from the Cold War to the Robbins Report.

Here are a few readings I'm working my way through:

- Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s

- The Plateglass Universities: Sussex, York, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Warwick and Lancaster

- The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain

- Free University Berlin: Candilis, Josic, Woods, Schiedhelm, Architectural Association Exemplar Projects 3

- Architectural Review 923: January 1974: University of Leeds (pp.2-30)

- RIBA Journal, Vol 71, Issue 1, January 1964: Higher Education: The Significance of Robbins (pp. 12 -18)

The satellite 'plate glass' universities are comprehensively recorded, less well documented are post-war urban universities meaning institutions such as UMIST tend to fall through the gaps. An information deficit this thesis seeks to address.