Detail of the Newbery Tower, Glasgow School of Art (1969–70; architects: Keppie Henderson & Partners). The alternating broken and boardmarked projections and recessions of the Newbery Tower’s in situ concrete work cross Le Corbusier and Paul Rudolph to produce a texture legible at any distance.
Photograph: Barnabas Calder

Andrew Melville Halls, St Andrews (1964–68; architect: James Stirling).
Photograph: Barnabas Calder

New Museums Site, Cambridge (1966–74; architects: Arup Associates). The lead-clad tower is almost all that can be seen from the nearby street.
Photograph: Barnabas Calder

New Museums Site, Cambridge; detail of the large pre-cast,
pre-stressed columns supporting the outward-stepping section.
The upper windows are legendarily challenging to clean.
Photograph: Barnabas Calder

The Newbery Tower, Glasgow School of Art (1969–70; architects: Keppie Henderson & Partners). The tower provides a landmark for the school on the top of Glasgow’s Garnethill. The influence of Louis Kahn is clear in the attached service and circulation towers, which retain a San Gimignano-like vigour in spite of later roof accretions.
Photograph: Barnabas Calder

University of London redevelopment
(1967–79; architects: Denys Lasdun & Partners).
To the academic pedestrian precinct side of the spine block, five terraced wings were intended to step down. In the event only this one was built.
Photograph: Barnabas Calder

Leeds University central area (1964–76; architects: Chamberlin Powell & Bon). The one major break with the anonymity of the departmental wings is the central lecture theatre block, where the angular sections of the theatres are allowed to give the exterior an expressiveness emphasised by the vertical applied shafts.
Photograph: Barnabas Calder

The University of East Anglia (1964–69; architects: Denys Lasdun & Partners). Stepped-section ‘ziggurats’ of student rooms curve inwards to form a grassy ‘harbour’, whilst behind them the ‘teaching wall’ accommodates academic departments.
Photograph: Barnabas Calder

The University of East Anglia (1964–69; architects: Denys Lasdun & Partners). Raised walkways between the residences and the teaching wall carry pedestrians on top, services beneath. Expressive service towers above the circulation cores house plant and give identity to the departments entered below.
Photograph: Barnabas Calder

The Brutalist University in Britain

PDF version

James Stirling, Denys Lasdun, Basil Spence, Gillespie Kidd & Coia, Alison and Peter Smithson, and many other leading British architects counted university work amongst their key projects, often handed enviable jobs by the quietly dominant force in post-war British architecture, Professor Sir Leslie Martin.

Architectural effort after 1945 in Britain ran in overlapping phases with the spread of the Welfare State: first through housing and primary schools, then into medical provision, the arts, and—with massive vigour through the 1960s—universities, with the creation of new institutions and considerable expansion of existing ones. Budgets for university work were relatively good, the clients often full of idealism and theoretically-driven educational ambition. The scale of the projects made university work attractively remunerative, but more than that, universities held a special cachet amongst architects. In particular, they used it as a laboratory to experiment with some of their preoccupations of the moment: the creation of community, multi-level external and internal circulation systems, and perhaps above all the expression of building technology, notably through a wide spectrum of exposed concrete techniques. Architectural debate centred round higher education, with Cedric Price dismissing the sorts of buildings discussed in this tour as being little more radical than medieval universities, and proposing his rival Potteries Thinkbelt project.[1]

The tone of the expansion was indeed a curious mix of the utopian and the conservative. The Robbins Report of 1963, a government investigation into the country’s requirements for higher education, made explicit the sociological ambition of much of this expansion, to ensure ‘the transmission of a common culture and common standards of citizenship.’[2] Perhaps in pursuit of this, a strong scientific and technological emphasis was balanced by considerable investment in the arts and humanities—traditional fields for the British elite.

Considerable autonomy was given to the academic administrations of the universities, especially at the seven New Universities established in England from 1961. At both the University of Essex and the University of East Anglia, for example, the Vice Chancellor (academic head) was appointed first. Next, in consultation with the Vice Chancellor, the architects were chosen. The universities arose spatially, institutionally, and educationally from a collaboration between architect and Vice Chancellor, even before the academic staff was appointed. Personal vision was given very free rein in these very costly projects (well over one million pounds each at 1960s prices), and at large scale (3,000 students in the first phase for each of the New Universities).

Although the overall project was visionary and liberal, the government body responsible for the detail of how funding was distributed, the University Grants Committee (UGC), was notoriously tough. When Basil Spence overspent on the first building at the new University of Sussex he was told that the overall budget would not change, obliging him to make substantial savings on the remaining buildings. Architects became adept at pleading special cases, particularly on grounds of one-off scientific equipment, but fundamentally the UGC kept budgets under control, and—a splendid irony given that it funded so much exciting modernism—it opposed architectural innovation, attempting to push architects into using a universal prefabrication system.

The buildings resulting from this boom, for all their intensity of exploratory technique, have nevertheless a family resemblance which has seen them widely mocked or disliked, and which even now leads good examples to suffer casual damage or demolition by administrations which fail to recognise the qualities of their buildings. At a time when British university education is facing a number of substantial challenges from the sharp rise in student fees in England, and heavy cuts in government funding across the country, the optimism and energy of only fifty years ago make a most refreshing study.

This tour will take in six projects, chosen to show the variety of the architectural output, from green-field campuses on the edge of towns to city centre campuses, visiting a range of building types from residential accommodation to laboratories.

Andrew Melville Halls, University of St Andrews
Architect: James Stirling, 1964–68
Postcode: KY16 9SU

Student housing offered architects the chance to experiment firstly with the production of repetitive cellular constructions, and secondly with the creation of community. On a grassy slope outside the pretty town of St Andrews—famous for its ancient university and its golf courses—James Stirling was commissioned to build a series of halls of residence. Only two fingers of accommodation were built, out of a projected eight, but this first phase nevertheless shows the elegance of the idea and the muscularity of its detailing.

Here, and throughout the British university expansion of the 1960s, the model of Oxford and Cambridge colleges proved seductive. Modernist facades disguise the influence, but the collegiate court—generally grassy—recur repeatedly in modernised form, here in the grassy return between the fingers of rooms. Stirling wished these to be left rough, and grazed by sheep (in the event rabbits predominate, supporting a large population of birds of prey), but the court survives here in the quiet greenery outside the student rooms, and brings with it an element of community-minded mutual overlooking. Equally pervasively, the traditional Oxbridge organisation of accommodation around vertical circulation rather than corridors is seen here and in the student rooms at the University of East Anglia (see below).

These traditionalist touches are offset by a self-conscious nauticality derived perhaps from Stirling’s preoccupation with Le Corbusier: glazed-in social decks run the length of the residential wings, and portholes recur repeatedly. The crystalline form and ribbed concrete components which make up the rooms express strongly the kit-of-parts prefabrication of the block, juxtaposed with the fragility of the system-glazed skin of the communal areas.

The New Museums Site, University of Cambridge
Arup Associates, 1966–74
Postcode: CB2 3QZ (the building is to the Corn Exchange Street side of a substantial site)

The first stage of an abortive attempt to rationalise a city-centre science site in which the electron had been discovered, the atom first split, and DNA’s structure worked out, this laboratory building for Metallurgy and Zoology was produced in a hurry and with minimal disruption to the surrounding research.

It was designed by a collaborative partnership of architects, engineers and quantity surveyors originating within the engineering practice Ove Arup and Partners, and newly-branded Arup Associates. The engineering is correspondingly expressive, with immense pre-cast columns (the least disruptive solution on a constricted site) supporting wide in situ concrete decks, and on the top level a series of small courtyards open to the sky. Crowded-in by mediocre utilitarian buildings, later neighbours have failed to link to its lonely raised podium, and it sits inconspicuously on a side-street. Nevertheless, the contrast between chunky detailing and delicate-looking structure makes for one of Cambridge’s best post-war buildings.

The Newbery Tower, Glasgow School of Art
Keppie, Henderson & Partners, 1969–70
Postcode: G3 6RQ

Opposite Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s better-known building for the Glasgow School of Art stands a small but assertive tower by a little-known Glasgow practice. Its variant on Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art and Architecture corduroy concrete was beautifully made to produce a texture legible near and far, and contrasted pleasingly with a chunky cladding to the open-plan studio spaces, with their sensational views over the beautiful city and the mountains beyond.

Built as part of a modest master-plan for the redevelopment of the School’s city-centre hilltop site, Newbery Tower was never acknowledged as a highlight of Glasgow’s rich architecture until the School decided to demolish it. There has subsequently been an extensive wave of appreciation for the building, particularly amongst students, but the tower is nevertheless currently being demolished, apparently because of its limited floor-plates and its poor environmental performance.

The University of London Bloomsbury Redevelopment
Denys Lasdun & Partners, 1967-79
Postcode: WC1H 0AL

Expanding rapidly through the 1930s and 50s, the University of London employed first Leslie Martin and then, from 1960, Denys Lasdun to bring order and architectural quality to its building programme. Lasdun’s scheme was never completed: after extensive demolition of early-nineteenth-century terraced housing, conservationists finally managed to bring the new development to a halt before the last phase could be constructed—a miserable compromise. The entire spine block, however, was completed, shielding an academic pedestrian precinct from road noise with a magnificently single-minded and monumental elevation. A wall of dark glass and bronze-anodised aluminium is topped and bottomed by repetitive in situ forms of proportionately heroic scale, housing service cores and machinery. Attempts to ‘soften’ the building by puny planting fail to detract from its stark beauty.

The University of Leeds central area
Chamberlin Powell & Bon, 1964–76
Postcode: LS2 9NH

Another tidying-up of an existing campus, this is one of a number of substantial developments by one of Britain’s leading Brutalist practices. It housed a range of departments in flexibly-partitioned wings of accommodation with various levels of internal and external circulation running across the sloping site. Large-scale buildings are complemented by large-scale hard landscaping including generous staircases and a big central square.

The repetitive elevations of the extruded wings are interrupted by the expressionistically one-off lecture theatre block in the centre. This resolved the difficulties of fitting irregular-shaped lecture theatres into the system-built department blocks. Here something of Brutalism’s enjoyment of Constructivist histrionics is seen.

The University of East Anglia
Denys Lasdun & Partners, 1964–69
Postcode: NR4 7TJ

The most architecturally impressive of the New Universities, UEA (as it was universally known from its earliest stages) shows Lasdun’s mastery in handling large-scale projects on tight budgets. The sculpting of decent, ordinary internal spaces into external architectural compositions on the scale of rocky outcrops is handled with assurance and drama. Linear teaching and research blocks—‘the teaching wall’—back terraces of stepped-section residences. These student rooms have balconies for each on the roof of the one below, running down to a large area of rough grass-land and trees.

The whole was a product of the long-standing collaboration between engineers at Ove Arup & Partners and architects at Denys Lasdun & Partners to evolve efficient, effective, and expressive prefabrication systems in which structural elements doubled as service-runs, and prefabricated elements tied into in situ service cores (expressed in over-scaled machinery towers above) which could accommodate anomalous spaces and which braced the building for additional strength.

Although existing schemes continued on site, the 1970s saw a collapse in the quantity and ambition of new university projects. At UEA don’t miss a rare highlight of that decade, the marvellous Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norman Foster’s 1974 shed for a first-rate private art collection.

Despite decades of hard use, incongruous additions and inappropriate planting, Lasdun’s UEA buildings convey the magnificent aspirations, energy and optimism of the 1960s as clearly and poignantly now as they did the day the last tower crane left the site.

ACCESS
Built at a period when the traditional street was under question, many of the above buildings do not have conventional street addresses. Instead the postcode of each is given, which will locate it using any online mapping service. University buildings in Britain are generally fairly accessible, and many remain in good condition with relatively light external modification beyond the usual glazing replacement and mobile phone masts. With a request in advance, very few doors are closed, and even if visiting casually it is possible to see exteriors of all the buildings discussed here from publicly-accessible land. The interiors, which are often much modified and in most cases less interesting, can often be visited by appointment, or in the case of non-residential buildings it is sometimes possible to visit them informally during their normal working hours.

Barnabas Calder
Department of Architecture
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, Scotland

Bibliography

Journals
An important source for the university architecture of the 1960s remains the architectural journals of the period. These can be easily searched through the RIBA Library’s excellent online catalogue at Architecture.com. Of particular relevance are the following special issues:
- ‘The Universities Build,’ Architectural Review, October 1963
- ‘The New Universities,’ Architectural Review, April 1970

Recent books with significant sections on post-war British architecture
- Fraser, Murray, with Joe Kerr. Architecture and the ‘Special Relationship’: The American Influence on Post-War British Architecture. London: Routledge, 2007
- Harwood, Elain. England: A Guide to Post-War Listed Buildings. London: Batsford, 2003
- Higgott, Andrew. Mediating Modernism: Architectural Cultures in Britain. London: Taylor and Francis, 2007
- Powers, Alan. Britain: Modern Architectures in History. London: Reaktion, 2007

Recent work on post-war British university architecture
General:
- Muthesius, Stefan. The Post-War University: Utopianist Campus and College. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001

University buildings in England by James Stirling:
- Berman, Alan. Jim Stirling and the Red Trilogy: Three Radical Buildings. London: Frances Lincoln, 2010

University of East Anglia:
- Fawcett, William, with Cambridge Architectural Research Ltd. ‘Conservation Development Strategy for the University of East Anglia’ (completed 2006)
- Muthesius, Stefan. Concrete and Open Skies: Architecture at the University of East Anglia, 1962–2000. London: Unicorn, 2001

Leeds University:
- Whyte, William. ‘The Modernist Moment at the University of Leeds, 1957–1977,’ Historical Journal 51 (2008), pp. 169–93

Cambridge University:
- Fawcett, William, with Cambridge Architectural Research Ltd. ‘Conservation Plan for New Hall, University of Cambridge’
- Goldie, Mark. Corbusier Comes to Cambridge: Post-War Architecture and the Competition to Build Churchill College. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007

Recent books on architects who worked prominently on universities
- Baker, Geoffrey. The Architecture of James Stirling and his Partners James Gowan and Michael Wilford: A Study of Architectural Creativity in the Twentieth Century. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011
- Brittain-Catlin, Timothy. Twentieth Century Architects: Leonard Menasseh and Partners. London: RIBA and English Heritage with Twentieth Century Society, 2010
- Crinson, Mark, ed. James Stirling: Early Unpublished Writings on Architecture. London: Routledge, 2010
- Curtis, William. Denys Lasdun: Architecture, City, Landscape. Oxford: Phaidon, 1994
- Glendinning, Miles. Modern Architect: The Life and Times of Robert Matthew. London: RIBA, 2008
- Harwood, Elain. Twentieth Century Architects: Chamberlin Powell and Bon. London: RIBA and English Heritage with Twentieth Century Society, 2011
- Long, Philip, and Jane Thomas, eds. Basil Spence: Architect. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2007
- Powell, Kenneth. Twentieth Century Architects: Powell and Moya. London: RIBA and English Heritage with Twentieth Century Society, 2009
- Vidler, Anthony. James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive. Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010

---