Campus Arcadia

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2000 by Peter Fawcett

A new campus for Nottingham University extends a very English tradition of pavilions in a romantic landscape to create a variety of places and spaces.

A mere half-century after receiving its Royal Charter, the University of Nottingham has now entered the ranks of Britain's older universities. University expansion in Britain is relatively recent. Even by the outbreak of the Second World War, the University Grants Committee could only muster Oxford, Cambridge, the northern civics and the celtic universities. Nottingham is the first of a group of postwar foundations which grew from previous university college status. More rapid expansion followed the findings of the Robbins Report of 1963, doubling student numbers during the 1960s to 220 000, with an attendant increase in universities from 22 to 46.

The post-Robbins orthodoxy reinforced a campus typology at York, Warwick, East Anglia et al, but also recommended considerable expansion of existing foundations such as Nottingham, where Basil Spence's progressive, but eclectic, Modernism co-existed with the Banker's Georgian [*] of Morley Horder and Cecil Howiff. Even today, the dominant vision remains of Classical pavilions set within a lush, Reptonian landscape.

Michael Hopkins clearly understood and reinterpreted this typology of a university community living and working in discrete pavilions set in parkland in his 1996 competition-winning entry for Nottingham's new campus. For such a massive investment, the competition system seemed to offer the university the best architectural opportunity, particularly in light of banal responses from regional practices to its commissions during the 1980s. Moreover, the Hopkins' recent successful competition entry for Nottingham's inland Revenue building (AR May 1995), less than a mile from the proposed new campus site, offered further evidence to support the competition approach.

In the event, the university secured a disused Sturmey-Archer gearbox factory on a 30-acre site within half a mile of the existing campus. From a shortlist of six, five entries, of diverse typological and architectural ambition, were submitted. Two entries, by Feilden Clegg and MacCormac Jamieson and Prichard, were based on a linear enclosed street running the entire length of the site, in the mistaken belief that the complexities of university activity could be programmed into such a simplistic, attenuated building form.

By contrast, the Hopkins' winning entry made overt references to the existing campus by effecting close correspondence between landscape and buildings; spare, elegant pavilions are associated with a lakeside promenade. At an urban scale, the bold planning strategy of a linear lake forming a buffer between associated buildings and an inter-war low density housing development, responded intelligently to an important brownfield site occupying a critical interface between the soft edge of suburbia and Nottingham's inner city.

Teaching and social spaces face west and south-west overlooking the lake, as does the serpentine postgraduate residential block that hugs the shore. But undergraduate halls of residence conform to a more familiar quad typology to the east of the campus, remote from lake and park. Here the Hopkins successfully invoke another memory, but this time of Nottingham and its characteristic broad tree-lined boulevards, where a formal entrance to the campus is contained by avenues of trees and identical brick facades of the halls of residence.

Related teaching pavilions effectively contain the informal park to the west and highly-organized parking and service areas to the east. The clarity of this strategy is instantly legible, mainly because the entrance boulevard from Triumph Road terminates in a transparent three-storey high refectory. This, crucially, allows tantalizing views through to lake and park beyond.

Organization of the teaching pavilions which oversail the lakeside promenade is similarly direct. Twin banks of teaching accommodation with a central corridor are punctuated by either three-storey high atria or open areas of hard landscape. So although this represents a highly repetitive regime, teaching spaces offer a variety of views either directly onto the park, into the spaces between the pavilions, or into the atria.

This alternating rhythm of teaching block and atrium also has the merits of flexibility. Large departments embrace two atria and each atrium can be enlarged to form nodes for collective student activity that punctuate the campus. The refectory is one such space, the Central Teaching Facility (effectively a lecture theatre complex) another. Beside the carefully-wrought neutrality of the teaching blocks, three vertically-stacked lecture theatres form a dramatic intrusion within an enlarged atrium. The largest lecture theatre is uppermost and the smallest at ground level to minimize the footprint.

A similar strategy informs the Learning Resource Centre (or library), a free-standing inverted cone which floats on a polygonal timber deck within the lake, and is unquestionably the most contentious element of the entire complex. Compared with the studied rationale of its neighbours, the library strikes a note of wilful frivolity; a helical ramp spirals round the periphery of the inverted cone leading to cramped segmental bookstacks on one side and to study carrels, with views over the lake, on the other. The inherent problem of reconciling access from a continuous ramp to adjacent floor planes is not particularly well resolved by a secondary system of short ramps, and an abrupt stop to the spiral endows the building with a curiously unfinished, jagged silhouette.