Legal precedent - architectural design of Cambridge University's Law Faculty building - includes plans and illustrations

Architectural Review, The, March, 1996 by Tony Hunt

Post-war Cambridge has built in haste, and repented at leisure. There is perhaps no better setting in which to examine the follies, extravagances and occasional triumphs of contemporary British architecture. Cambridge can make - or unmake - an architect's reputation. But it is the city and the university that have had to put up with the long term consequences of a prolonged and enthusiastic flirtation with architectural superstars. Considered en masse, the results can be disheartening. That, at any rate, was the conclusion reached by Philip Booth and Nicholas Taylor in their Guide to Cambridge New Architecture (1972). Even today, after the healing interval of 20 years, it is hard to disagree with their conclusion that the huge influx of post-war talent has led' not to an enriched environment but to conclusion and overstatement'.

There are few better places in Cambridge to study this confusion and overstatement than the Sidgwick Avenue site. Long ago, Nikolaus Pevsner argued that Cambridge's future lay beyond the Cam 'in a campus more beautiful than any in America, a precinct much larger than the precincts of the individual colleges, yet a precinct all the same'. Sidgwick Avenue was to become Cambridge's intellectual theme park, with the individual arts faculties mimicking in their layout the format of the colleges - and by implication vying with them as a focus of learning.

Hugh Casson's masterplan and finished buildings, though much derided at the time for their picturesque obsessions with cobbles and bollards, and finicky fenestration, were true to the spirit of such a collegiate campus. And although the gale-swept 'cloister' running beneath the raised faculty blocks is no place to linger on one of Cambridge's more Siberian winter afternoons, this is an honourable and largely successful piece of townscape in the Cambridge idiom of turf and paving, open and enclosed space. One can have too much of a good thing however, and it is perhaps fortunate that the Casson Conder scheme was not allowed to extend all the way to West Road. The rivalries and trade-offs between dons and departments on one hand, and colleges who own most of the land, on the other, have always put paid to comprehensive thinking on this scale. In consequence, many contemporary buildings at Cambridge stand shoulder to shoulder and ill at ease, like VIPs at a cocktail party who have not been introduced to one another. At Sidgwick Avenue, James Stirling's angry red History Faculty was clearly not on speaking terms with anybody; and so it has fallen to Norman Foster on the adjoining site to effect a few introductions.

Given Cambridge's long-term fixation with glamorous architects, it was obvious that sooner or later Foster would land a commission here. The question to be asked is, has yet another intervention from a brilliantly talented outsider merely added to the confusion and overstatement which is already rife at Cambridge, or has there been a genuine gain? The first thing that needs to be said of the new Law Faculty is that quite apart from its merits as a building - which are considerable - it is a tactful insertion into a very difficult site. To build opposite the History Faculty must be the architect's equivalent of donning the shirt of Nessus. In form, materials and orientation, Stirling,s glowering masterpiece is a calculated snub to the Casson Conder block next to it and a threat to anything which might be placed in the immediate vicinity. One of Foster's achievements has been to establish, or in some cases, reinstate, a coherent north-south axis through the Sidgwick site; and by splaying the form of his own building 45 degrees to match the History Faculty and avoid a few listed trees, he has created a breathing space - not quite courtyard, not quite square - in which all the buildings can coexist in something reasonably close to harmony. Part of this sensitivity to site may be due to Foster's Cambridge-educated partner in charge, Spencer de Grey.

The Casson Conder raised faculty block is a particular beneficiary. Foster and de Grey have restored the stepped plinth on the western side and clad the Law Faculty's southern elevation in reconstituted stone and Cambridge blue panels of opaque glass with narrow clear glass vision strips. The two blocks are in dialogue, and will get on even better when the trees between them have a chance to mature. It is obvious already from this that the Law Faculty is a contextual building whose forms and materials have been influenced by its neighbours. The flat southern facade and the splayed western wall are the direct response to context. Only on the north elevation where the view consists of mature trees and (eventually) a lot more Foster buildings, has Foster had a chance to flex his muscles.

The result is one of those tours-de-force in steel and glass which is neither window nor wall nor roof but all three. Moreover its abrupt termination along the southern facade gives a hint of what might have been - an all-embracing steel and glass enclosure vaulting effortlessly over the bookstacks within.