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.
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