York, UK
In opposition to its contemporary universities, whose urban patterns sought to concentrate university life at the nuclei of their respective campuses, the University of York’s chosen model of collegiate dispersion was an academic principle reflected in the design of the campus. York, whose aspirations for the new university was to ‘establish a university of the status of Oxford or Cambridge’ was to have a fundamental collegiate structure, but with an unprecedented ethos of egalitarianism, openness, and inter-collegiality not associated with its aspirational forebears.
Like the other Plateglass universities, the site for the University of York was a former country estate at the fringe of the city - Heslington Hall and Estate - whose already established landscape was to form the picturesque condition for the new university. The site was varied topographically, bisected by a marshy lake, and interspersed with mature copses in the English landscape tradition, forming a bucolic idyll as the pre-existing condition for the new institution. Proposed by architect Andrew Derbyshire of RMJM, the plan was in contrast to the kind of centripetal megastructure proposed by the architects of the other new universities, such as UEA’s groundscrapers or Essex’s mat-building. In fact, the plan was wholly un-architectural, and instead focused on the relationships between the colleges and main university buildings dispersed at nodes around the landscape.
The plan envisaged a series of collegiate centres scattered as clusters on a constellation of pathways mapped over the topography of rolling hills and lakes. Orbiting the Central Hall, as an origin point in the plan, a web of meandering routes would emanate out to link the small collegiate villages sited on the banks of the lake, where the routes would there intersect with the college buildings, passing through en route to the next one. Expansion could be easily accommodated by adding another node to the network and linking it to other nodes. The plan appears strikingly primitive and disintegrated in relation to the formal ‘urban’ structuration of other Plateglass universities, yet appears to encapsulate the academic organisation of the collegiate university in its architectural organisation.
The composed casualness of the arrangement, where colleges emerge out of the mature landscape like pavilions and recede as lakeside follies, seemed to be an appropriate response to both the picturesque estate and the academic organisation of the university. It was the Cambridge 'Backs', where colleges face on to the river and meadows, which was established as a scenographic precedent. The plan attempted to generate a coherent environment on a more cosmic scale, where other campuses attempted to generate a concentrated form on a microcosmic scale. Nowhere on campus is the entire arrangement visible in its totality. As such, the logic of the university is not so immediately apprehensible, resisting a monumental identity, and encourages perambulation to understand the relationship of parts to the whole.
The efficient movement of people and its potentially performative aspect was a key tenet of modernist space, and became an organisational armature for many postwar universities, with the circulatory spine often conceived as the literal and figurative backbone of the campus, compare Bath, Lancaster. By organising the University of York campus along a trail through a rhythm of open landscape and collegiate courts, the architects created an environment where movement in space and time came to the fore of the experience of the campus. This form of experience counterposes the trend at the time, where experience was derived from spectacular architectural or monumental forms and their superiority over the landscape.
The coherence of the campus in the landscape is achieved by the continuous pedestrian route through parkland which, although presenting multiple options to possible routes, is orchestrated by a covered walkway which converge on the Central Hall. From the Central Hall as an origin point, whose outer form is essentially wrapped in a route consisting of open staircases and an external viewing gallery, the network of paths radiate into the landscape forming curvilinear loops towards the colleges embedded in the landscape. A lightweight colonnade offers a covered path, whilst free-standing where it passes through the wooded areas of the campus, the covered path intersects with the colleges, drawing various university members through the colleges en route to their destination. This processional collegiality is a sharp contrast to the closed insularity of the Oxbridge college, which form metaphorical cul-de-sacs rather than permeable thoroughfares.
The processional route through the campus is internalised through the colleges, wherein it acts as a street along which the college functions are aggregated. The linear route bifurcates to form smaller branch routes through the college courts, forming colonnades, cloisters, and internal passageways which give access onto residential staircases; the more labyrinthine path network in the colleges creates spatial knots and slows movement through the campus whole. The passing visitor find themselves witness to college life when moving through the campus, passing by college foyers, refectories, halls, bars and common spaces whilst in transit to their own college. This was an explicit aim in the mission of the University of York, to dissolve the hierarchy and cellular tradition of colleges in favour of an accessible communality.
Visually the colleges all appear to form part of a greater whole, owing to their material uniformity due to the CLASP modular panel system. The use of this systems building method, whilst primarily for expediency, ensured that the various colleges did not erode the essential integrity of the university as a whole, so that they may form part of a collective identity. Here the York collegiate model digresses once again from the Oxbridge, with the emphasis on the entire community, where the college is an affiliative social unit within the broader society of the university. Although self-governing, the colleges at York are not hegemonic institutions, with one critic stating ‘nowhere else did concentrated thought about what a university ought to be like in a modern democracy come so close to finding physical expression’.
The colleges, realised uniformly in the CLASP system, form a regulatory logic to the campus. Their visual consistency forms the rule, to which select university functions provide the exception. Notable buildings such as the Library (below left) and the Central Hall (below right) are visually distinguished and occupy pivotal positions in the landscape, flexing their architectural muscularity beyond the constraints imposed by the CLASP system. These primary buildings are considered nodes on the plan, and collect the paths of communication into gathering points. In the forecourt to the library, the change in level and convergence of pathways is managed by a ramped helical courtyard in which students orbit around a sculpture on their ascent to the library, emerging on-axis with the library entrance. This orchestration of movement reveals the conception of such to be more than simply a matter of efficiency, but rather something to prolong and celebrate. A lakefront square forms the forecourt to the Central Hall, which creates a university commons in addition to devolved collegiate commons in their satellite locations. In this central position, movement is arrested in a static point from which the student can orient themselves in relation to the rest of the university, as if at the immobile centre of a clock face.
In opposition to the displacement of urbs into rure which characterised the ‘urban’ Plateglass universities set on creating compact miniature cities in the countryside (such as Lancaster, Essex and UEA), the University of York is a plan whose objective of dispersal is no less amorphous. The York campus plan operates conceptually on the scale of an entire landscape estate adopting the form of a constellation, whilst simultaneously atomising the form of the university into apparently small follies in the landscape. The arrangement of college buildings, which appear to owe their disposition to Dutch Structuralist forms, resemble parts of a large mat-building, which have been fragmented and distributed around the park. However, of course here each fragment is a college community, and therefore a complete entity in its own right. The consequent totality to which the college buildings amount to - due to their similar urban layout, and an identical architectonic system - coheres the dispersal of the colleges into a rational whole. It is in this sense of a campus which is at once dilating and contracting, centripetal and centrifugal which reinforces the relationship between people and movement, architecture and topography: establishing York as a true academic landscape, a campus in the proper sense.
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