Excerpt: University campuses — particularly those of the New Universities of the 1960s — are microcosmic representations of a society, where the holistically planned environment establishes the preconditions for the evolution of that society.
On the level of the individual and the collective, university campuses are thus examples of a total environment which contain the possibility of being didactic in their own right: informing behaviour and providing the formative conditions for individual self-realisation and collective action.
The fieldwork component of this thesis entailed a series of visits to postwar university campuses in the UK and US to record their physical composition. Primarily involving on-site sketches, photography and taking record of their spatial and architectural characteristics; this fieldwork aimed to extrapolate common features from each postwar campus to establish a retrospective architectural theory of the postwar campus. In the UK, this manifested most clearly in the campuses of the New Universities (eg York, UEA etc), where their large rural sites permitted unprecedented license to shape a radical 'map of learning'. In the US, campuses in urban environments (Chicago was taken as an exemplary location) permitted a heightened relationship between town and gown, and posited the campus as a vehicle for urban renewal. In all, 11 sites were visited of varying kinds, from conservative establishments in modern appearances; such as Churchill College, Cambridge, to existing campus expansion plans: such as the University of Leeds, to inner city de novo institutions; such as UIC, Chicago. Over this fieldwork I aimed to visit a variety of different postwar universities to examine the extremes of university and campus-planning logic, however remarkable international consensus in what constituted modern higher education was apparent, reified through the form of the campus. It was clear that international modernism had established a universal campus language with local inflections. In the concluding period of this course, one particular case study will serve as a site for design interventions in a 'post-university' campus, examining creative reuse strategies for a defunct campus in Manchester. This design will draw upon the universal campus language which is set out in the thesis component of this course, employing it as a lodestar for an approach to reprogramme the campus beyond the university.
University campuses visited between Spring - Winter 2021, case study reports for each campus are found below:
08 UMIST, Manchester (1960) - subject of further study
Limitations of Study: due to the covid-19 pandemic and the coincidence of this fieldwork with university vacations many of the campuses visited were done so without students present. Whilst this enabled relatively unencumbered access around the campus, human activity was largely absent, which proved to be a key determinant in the conception of the campus. As such, this thesis focusses more upon the architectural and urban composition of the campus than the potential implications on individual and collective action and sociology.
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