One of my most memorable encounters with Modernist architecture came early one morning when I glimpsed the towers and megastructures of the University of Essex through mist and trees, and it seemed like a kind of Brutalist fairyland. Indeed, many of the best-known and most eye-catching university buildings of that period do seem, in retrospect, somewhat unbelievable. The three world-famous, bright red, grubbily glazed, weirdly awkward architectural giants designed by James Stirling – the engineering building at Leicester University, the history faculty in Cambridge and the Florey Building of the Queen’s College, Oxford – were not only hard to credit, they were also fatally flawed in almost every respect, technical, constructional and practical. The last of the three has now been cordoned off and stands inaccessible and empty, like a Pop-art dinosaur, stranded beyond a car park.
Nearly all other prestige university buildings of the 1960s are, however, still very much in use and they tell an interesting story about the values of the period: what higher education stood for; who would come to these places, which were in most cases isolated from town life; and how a building could express not only the answers to these questions but also nurture a new community and maybe even a new idea of Britain in the postwar era. Barr’s version of the story – accompanied by his excellent new black-and-white photographs on almost every page – takes a quizzical and often critical look at the best known of them, but at the same time develops a clear and logical argument. The ones he likes best are those which were the most rationally planned: the University of Lancaster, which is like an organic but clearly structured miniature town, and that of York, a collection of unpretentious buildings set in a beautiful landscape. Neither of these depended on an architect’s grand aesthetic gesture for their success, and both of them have expanded and aged elegantly.
But for the most part, this is a kind of tragedy in which architects, who were themselves mostly part of a closed circle of well-connected professionals, adopted personal attitudes and mannerisms without thinking much about the type of people that the new universities were setting out to attract. Denys Lasdun, who dreamed up the National Theatre, believed that buildings should be grand artistic gestures; the concrete ziggurats he designed for the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, are spectacular: breathtaking in their impertinence and bank-breaking in their catastrophic technical failures. Yet alongside these enormous projects are a series of modest, careful, expensive interventions for Oxbridge colleges in often tight and heavily constrained sites that for a while nurtured the best practitioners of the day. The sinuous curving wing of brick towers and serpentine glass designed by ABK for Keble College, Oxford, completed in the early 1970s, should have been a brilliant harbinger for a second golden age that never happened; sadly, building for education everywhere soon descended into the charmless boxes of contractor-led ‘design and build’.
No other field provided the opportunity to express the architectural ideas of the 1960s as freely as the design of university buildings, which represented the cutting edge of modern architecture in the UK. Author John Barr places the buildings in a wider social, cultural and political context, examining the combination of circumstances and attitudes that produced results that are equally admired and detested.
