The eighth lamp - design of Ruskin Library, Lancaster University, England

Architectural Review, The, June, 1998 by Peter Davey

The most important collection of John Ruskin's papers, books and pictures has been brought together in a treasure house which celebrates the profound ideas and passionate feelings of the greatest critic of the nineteenth century.

Lancaster University was built in the '60s boom, the last time that the Duke's remark that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton was taken seriously: all new universities were built out of town, so students would have ready access to games pitches. As a result, the architects had to try desperately to generate some sort of urbanity and sense of community amid the fields. The Shepheard & Epstein plan (AR April 1970) still works well today, but its courts are largely closed to the outside world by inexpressive walls of brick and concrete.

Now, the place has acquired a landmark and a sign. As you approach up the winding drive from the main road, the smoothly curved walls of the Ruskin Library stand out like a little keep. It is also somehow to do with the sea,(1) striped and almost slippery like a fish, and pointed, cresting the escarpment like a skiff, while signalling it like a lighthouse. Behind is the neutral backdrop of the new extension to the original university library.

Both extension and keep are by MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, and the contrast between the two is a proper reflection of their roles. The extension reinforces the library's role as the university's main academic plant and accepts the predominantly neutral expression of the rest of the campus. The Ruskin Library is clearly very special. It contains the largest collection of material about or owned by the great Victorian savant. Books, papers and pictures were originally put together by the Liberal MP and educationalist Howard Whitehouse (1873-1955), and kept at his Bembridge school in the Isle of Wight. The need to keep the material in better conditions, the possibility of relating it to collections at nearby Brantwood (Ruskin's home on Lake Coniston), and the opportunity offered by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund all focused and facilitated the project of building at Lancaster University, already known for its Ruskin studies.

The site is the old university bowling green (those '60s bureaucrats were mad about every sort of sport), on a podium defined by a long retaining wall, so the lighthouse-keep stands on a ceremonial platform. Sparkling marble aggregate enlivens the slightly rough surface of its concrete block walls, which are given scale by thin horizontal bands of polished dark green precast concrete.

The curved walls form a protective, almost imperforate carapace. At each end, you can get glimpses of the warm insides of the organism through glass panels. You enter from the east through a bronze-clad porch which opens into a double-height entrance hall. Immediately, the fundamental organisation of the place becomes clear. A huge Venetian-red free-standing box dominates the space. On each side of it, light shoots down from lanterns onto dark, virtually black battered walls, which are given a curious, almost slimy texture (reminiscent of sea walls) by being sealed with linseed oil. Between them and the box, gently ramped paths rise towards the reading room, another double-height space at the west end of the building.

Both parti and the sacral atmosphere irresistibly recall MacCormac's Fitzwilliam College chapel in Cambridge (AR April 1992), where a rectangular form is contained within curved walls with light pouring down between them. In Cambridge, the inner structure is a sort of baldacchino, enclosing altar and congregation. At Lancaster, the box is plainly a treasure chest, its waxed and polished plaster walls strapped with oak frames, the joints of which are emphasized by cruciform insets of polished bronze. It floats up mysteriously into the entrance space through a floor of glass and slate, a metaphor of the sea, like the lagoon-lawn of long waving blue-green grass which will be planted all round the building. The glass floor is already somewhat scratched, and is intended gradually to become largely translucent, like the turbid waters of Venice: no bad thing perhaps, because the basement store (like the bottom of the lagoon) is untidy.

You are drawn up the ramps to the reading room, a very calm place, quite small in plan, but with a vertical glazed panel similar to the one at the entrance. This offers amazing views of sunset, sky and countryside, stretching away to the shallow waters of Morecambe Bay, the part of England topographically most like the Venetian lagoon. The space is given its air of distinction not just by height but by the special solid, well-made furniture: tall chairs of English oak upholstered in leather, and tables with oak frames inset with clark fine-grained walnut. Computers have introduced a jarring and utilitarian note: perhaps their design will improve during the expected long life-time of the building.