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.
Comments