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Erskine's Aula: Ralph Erskine and his colleagues continue their reinvention of the Stockholm University Frescati campus as a humane model for higher learning institutions - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, May, 2002 by Henry Miles

UNIVERSITY GREAT HALL, STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

ARCHITECT

RALPH ERSKINE

The University of Stockholm's campus at Frescati is in many ways a disappointing place. This is a country that has a proper long-established European respect for education and scholarship; it has produced the wonderful ancient university at Uppsala, still setting the tone in its medieval and eighteenth-century Baltic city (founded in 1477-Stockholm is 400 years younger). So it was sad to see such a lot of '70s soulless contractor-dominated utilitarian construction at the new campus at Stockholm (like, to be fair, almost everywhere else in Western Europe at the time).

It was a grim place until Erskine arrived. His Allhus (AR November 1981) gave the campus a social centre; his university library was full of humane invention, setting an example for the building type throughout the world. It offered an extraordinary range of experiences, from individual private brooding, to communal chatting, from smoking on balconies to delving in the stacks.

All these are clearly quite different from the original mass of the campus - they are (to use Aldo van Eyck's terminology) full of individual places, rather than vacuous spaces. They have a proper sense of the importance of the particular, the nature of the small group, complex widening social inter-relationships and the simultaneous need to remain an individual - perhaps the most difficult challenges facing people of undergraduate age. All with prolific invention and a sense of fun: all at a time when Swedish architecture in general was in the ice-clammy grasp of a deadly alliance between the bureacracy and the contracting industry (the Swedes were the inventors of PFI). How did Erskine do it? Partly at least through a profound understanding of the system, using prefabrication and standardization on the whole and saving resources for special moments like light chutes and key elements you touch, like handrails.

Erskine's latest contribution to the Frescati site is the Aula Magna, the university's main ceremonial space. Here, the usual constructive disciplines had to be relaxed to a degree because it would be impossible to make a hall for 1200 people with the building techniques so beloved by the Swedish building industry. The main volume is based on a Greek (or rather Roman) amphitheatre with steeply raked seating that offers good sight and sound lines. Strongly profiled wooden panelling is used on the walls and the ceiling is lined with timber as well. The hall's shape and the reflective and absorptive qualities of the panels make the space very responsive to speech - it is possible to give a speech without using the electronic amplification system. The volume can be divided into two, with seating for 500 and 700, so that it may be used for normal lectures, as well as large meetings.

The foyers take their outline partly from the magnificent oaks that scatter across the Frescati site (Erskine was equally respectful to existing trees in the neighbouring Allhus, and in parts of the university library). The upper foyer is entirely glazed, offering views north over the park-like landscape. It is laid out so that it can be used for student study when it is not acting as gathering area before and after lectures. Because of the slope in the site, the lower foyer is partly cut into the rock, and has a more cave-like atmosphere.

The foyers curve round the perimeter of the fan-like plan with genial and transparent openness. The sides and base of the plan (east, west and south) are impervious and clad in patterned brickwork, an Erskine favourite for blank walls that dates at least as far back as the mighty face of the Byker housing estate in Newcastle (AR April 1985). Both in its expression and its splendid volume, the Aula Magna is a proper focus for the ceremonial life of the university.