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
