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:
Linear spine building for teaching
Cellular Ziggurat buildings for accommodation
Freestanding buildings housing key extra-curricular functions (library, union, etc)
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.
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