County champion - School of Architecture, Portsmouth, England

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 1996 by Peter Davey

Unlike most schools of architecture, Portsmouth's new facility combines an assured handling of space and light with inspirational placemaking.

For some reason, schools of architecture are not usually memorable (or even pleasant) places in which to spend the formative years of one's artistic and professional life. It often seems surprising that marvellous work can emerge from such grim and gritty surroundings. There are quite a lot that are more or less all right, in the Cambridge, Otaniemi or Edinburgh manner, but the fine ones can be counted on the fingers of one hand: Auckland, Harvard, Copenhagen, Rice, and now Portsmouth.

Portsmouth used to be a truly nasty, gloomy architecture school, housed in what seemed like a commercial office block. The new school could not be more different. It is in Portsea, a tough part of the town, but a very important one, for it lies on the axis between the superbly honed masts of HMS Victory (Nelson's flagship moored as a museum in the harbour) and the civic square (one of the few proper pieces of city built in England in the anti-urban decades after the Second World War).(1) The school is at present at the most westerly end of the campus, and its presence goes a long way to refuting those who (sometimes rightly) sneer at the government's translation of the polytechnics into universities as a cheap trick to broaden Britain's higher education base. The school is by a team from the Hampshire County office led by Colin Stansfield Smith.(2) It is fundamentally U-shaped in plan, a parti turned into a quadrangle by the horrid presence of the university's Buckingham building which contains the geography department. This is at least as grim as the old architecture school and is a piece of utility heavy prefabrication which second-rate architects turned out by the mile to fulfil the aspirations of Wilson's '60s government to offer higher education to a vastly wider range of people than ever before. The ideal was noble, but unfortunately the places provided by the programme were often dreadful,(3) and the whole effort can now be seen as one of the contributing factors to the general decay of awareness in Britain of the importance of the res publica and the general triumph of the notion of quantity over quality.

All those buildings were created while Britain was comparatively rich. One of the extraordinary things about the new school is that it has been built at a time when the country has become poor (in European terms). Yet the new school makes a very strong notion of place: it establishes the colonising presence of university in one of the poorest parts of the city and, perhaps by its very nature, it will help to hoist the neighbourhood.

With great generosity, the new work stretches its arms out to embrace the tatty old Buckingham building and make it part of a new urban conversation. A pair of glass-covered pergolas connect the two and define the formal place between them. This is a still, elegant space in the middle of the run-down inner city, consciously made as an echo of the cloisters in which universities began. But this cloister is a thoroughly modern affair, made with a laminated timber structure that gives it much greater spans than the pointed arches of medieval construction, and it is of course much lighter. The result is less solemn than the Gothic original, but it will allow some of the traditional functions of the cloister: the amiable perambulation, the casual encounter, the enclosure of the ideal garden.

The pergolas lead you to the giant abstracted porticos of the school building itself. They are made in the same materials as the cloister: laminated timber and patent glazing. They have the kind of rather histrionic grandeur that reminds you of Aldo Rossi or Leon Krier at the height of their early '80s eloquence. But those architects, even when they built, were never able to create the slender, light elegance that Stansfield Smith has captured here. There is a gesture of welcome, and at the same time, a firm affirmation of the technology of our times as the thin edges of the glass articulate the sky over the solid, almost Roman, heavy laminated wood posts and beams of the trusses.(4)

After all this rather formal approach, the entrances to the new building are a bit underplayed, with simple glazed double doors at ground level and the same at the top of the stairs that rise on both sides of the middle part of the plan that contains a cafeteria on the ground floor, topped by the main lecture theatre, over which is the great clerestory-lit crit room.

But however you enter the building, you are almost immediately overwhelmed by the presence of its huge inner space. This full-height volume is a trope that is often used in modern office blocks, but very rarely to such effect: a sudden vertical whoosh of space greets you after the predominantly horizontal progression. Galleries look over it; a bridge flies to connect the crit room to the main body. At ground level, the volume is connected to the formal garden through the transparent walls of the cafeteria, the intermediary room that would be the great formal entrance, in an ordinary classical building (which this one sometimes suggests that it is).