The Postwar University, Utopianist Campus And College - Review

Architectural Review, The, July, 2001 by Andrew Derbyshire

Failure, or at least a symptom of it, was however thrust in our faces by the student demonstrations of the late 1960s. Muthesius tells us 'In 1977 there were rumours of a sizeable, unofficial list of candidates for closure ... It seemed that the "troubles" involved chiefly the most modern institutions, especially the New Universities, with the case of Essex being the most severe ... Only the London School of Economics suffered more. Next in severity came Warwick and East Anglia ... while Sussex experienced fewer problems and the others remained relatively quiet'.

There was no attempt to relate this experience to the architecture of the seven in any systematic way and Muthesius has to fall back on anecdote -- to which I can add my penn'orth. Attempting to explain the relative tranquillity at York an academic told me, 'However angry you get indoors it's very difficult to keep it up when you go outside to a world of trees, grass, water and ducks'. But this is no substitute for statistics.

Megalomania

Muthesius follows the story of the English Seven with an eye-opening tour of university building which had been going on in North America and Europe at the same time. We are confronted by amazing scenes of megalomaniac structures of staggering size and monotonous brutality, the social consequences of which don't bear contemplation. Once again the exasperating Muthesius tantalizes us with hints of demolitions, student riots and great fallings out.

He concludes his case studies, however, on a more hopeful note with a description of the design for an extension of the Freic Universitat Berlin by Candiis, Josic and Woods. This was a rectilinear network of spaces and connections contained in a l4ha (34 acre) rectangle in which absolutely anything could happen. It was generally only two storeys high with the occasional basement, had no major entrance and no centre, focus or keynote buildings. It was the apotheosis of indeterminacy promising great flexibility and giving the users the freedom to be their own architects. I wished when I first saw it that we had been so bold at York. The theme was picked up by extensions of the Phillips Universitat at Marburg an der Lahn and the Loughborough University of Technology, both of which predicated the use of lightweight prefabricated building components exploiting the standard structural grid as we had done at York. Because of this philosophical echo I have always been curious to know how these three experiments have worked out in practice, but once again Muthesius is obscure.

The book ends as it began, with a discourse on semantics -- this time on the dialectic of 'Utopia or Instrumentalism?' which I translate as Idealism v Materialism -- the tightrope on which every architect must balance. Muthesius concludes 'How then do the utopianist efforts of the 1960s look today? One thing we can say is that they did not turn into dystopia. That was probably because the founders and designers did not want actual utopias; in their view, they combined as much utopia as possible with as much instrumentalism as necessary'. Precisely; but why then were they all so different and have they, in spite of that achieved the same results? A glance at the league tables, for what they're worth, reveals that this is by no means the case and we come back to my old concern about the need to find the connection between design causes and performance effects. With this in mind I turned to Brian Edwards for help. In vain; I had hoped that he would at least bring us up-to-date news of the Seven. How are the ide als of their founders standing up to economic stringency and the modern student way of life 40 years on? Is it true that York is to demolish one of its colleges and that Kent has abandoned them altogether? Have most of them handed over architectural patronage to the builders in the quest for cheap capital to put up student residence?