The Postwar University, Utopianist Campus And College - Review

Architectural Review, The, July, 2001 by Andrew Derbyshire

By Stefan Muthesius. London: Yale University

Press. 2000. [pound]35

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

By Brian Edwards. London: Span Press. 2000. [pound]60

Two books on university design cause Andrew Derbyshire, chief architect of York University, England to reflect on a heroic period when architecture seemed to directly influence life.

Stefan Muthesius has written one of the most exasperating books ever, and yet it taught me a lot about a subject I thought I knew well.

I started, as I suppose every reviewer should, at the beginning and found myself ploughing through a discussion of the relative meanings of utopian as opposed to utopianist. I would normally have skipped from there on, looked at the pictures, read the bits of the text that caught my eye and put the book on the shelf for reference -- because it's pretty encyclopaedic on the subject and carries an excellent bibliography. But I wanted to get on to the author's treatment of the seven English New Universities of the '60s to see what an independent observer would make of what I and my colleagues had been up to in those heady days.

So I stuck to the task and having left the semantics behind found a fascinating description of university development in pre-war United States. I had thought when we were designing the development plan for York that we were breaking new ground. I hadn't realized that we were (or at any rate I was) unconsciously reflecting not only the growing concern in the States to make student well-being the central focus of university education, but also the precedent of the liberal arts college in breaking down boundaries between subjects and insisting on student residence as an essential prerequisite of university life.

Muthesius shows in a series of brilliant vignettes that these were more or less formative concerns for the other six as well. What he writes about York corresponds uncannily with my memory of what actually happened and includes anecdotal material which I have not seen written down anywhere else. Assuming that this is equally true of his accounts of the rest, this part of the book must be essential reading for anyone who was involved at the time or who's interested in the interactions between people that make buildings happen.

Freedom

Two things are worth noting. One is that these seven new universities were designed by a small number of people who had a lot of freedom to do what they thought was right. In particular the relationship between the Vice-Chancellor and the architect was crucial -- close and fruitful in the case of Sussex, York, Essex, East Anglia and Lancaster; fraught in the case of Kent (Bill Holford resigned after three years complaining that the autocratic Templeman hadn't given him adequate instructions), and uneasy at Warwick where early design intentions were confused by the grandiose ambitions of the Coventry city architect who had to give way to YRM who were then replaced by Gabby Epstein from Lancaster. Nevertheless Warwick has always been high in university rankings while Kent has struggled. What lessons do we learn from that?

The second is that these close relationships have led Muthesius to the conclusion that architects had complete control of the brief and the ensuing design. This was not true at York where there was a genuine partnership led firmly by the academics which produced a brief based on a large number of difficult questions which the founding fathers courageously answered. I believe this was also true of Lancaster and Essex. I am startled to learn, however, that Basil Spence at Sussex didn't believe in development plans and Lasdun at East Anglia had no brief and didn't want one.

These unusual circumstances of independent autonomy and financial security led to a high degree of brave experimentation and a wide range of different academic and social aspirations which generated a corresponding variety of different design solutions. Lancaster, Kent and York were based on multi-functional colleges which integrated academic, leisure and residential uses while Sussex, East Anglia and Essex separated out academic functions from residence. Lancaster, East Anglia and Essex opted for high density urban concentrations in parkland; York, Kent and Sussex deployed linked building units in a low density landscape. Muthesius writes off Warwick, the most orthodox of the seven, rather disparagingly as 'Last International Modern' and concludes 'All in all, Warwick's importance in the context of the unified plans of the Seven New Universities was chiefly one of contrast'.

At York we saw such diversity as a rich field for research into the relationship between built form and academic and social outcomes which would help to establish greater certainty for the clients and architects of future universities. As Muthesius reports, our efforts to promote this failed and the unique opportunity was lost. Even at York it was 20 years before a systematic review of the performance of the development plan was undertaken through surveys of student opinion, even though the idea had been theoretically endorsed at the beginning. Young institutions fear the consequences of discovering failure more strongly than the well established.