Fieldwork Report

Fieldwork

Research Thesis

Spaces of Edification Contents Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Campus Case Studies Site Sketchbooks Site Photographs Fieldwork Itinerary

Case Studies Featured 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

Sidgwick Site Chancellor’s Court University of Essex University of East Anglia University of Warwick University of York Northwestern University Sites Illinois Institute of Technology University of Illinois at Chicago

This document records the urban condition of university colleges and campuses visited between Spring and Winter 2021

UK UK UK UK UK UK USA USA USA

Cambridge Leeds Colchester Norwich Coventry York Evanston Chicago Chicago

1956 1960 1964 1964 1965 1963 1968 1940 1963

It forms the foundation of a wider study into the spatiality of the university campus which examines the relationships between higher education, architecture and urbanism

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Campus Case Studies Part 1 The fieldwork component of this thesis entailed a series of visits to postwar university campuses in the UK and US to record their physical composition. Primarily involving on-site sketches, photography and taking record of their spatial and architectural characteristics; this fieldwork aimed to extrapolate common features from each postwar campus to establish a retrospective architectural theory of the postwar campus. In the UK, this manifested most clearly in the campuses of the New Universities (York, UEA etc), where their large rural sites permitted unprecedented license to shape a radical ‘map of learning’. In the US, campuses in urban environments (Chicago was taken as an exemplary location) permitted a heightened relationship between town and gown, and posited the campus as a vehicle for urban renewal.

In all, 11 sites were visited of varying kinds, from conservative establishments in modern appearances; such as Churchill College, Cambridge, to existing campus expansion plans: such as the University of Leeds, to inner city de novo institutions; such as UIC, Chicago. Over this fieldwork I aimed to visit a variety of different postwar universities to examine the extremes of university and campus-planning logic, however remarkable international consensus in what constituted modern higher education was apparent, reified through the form of the campus. It was clear that international modernism had established a universal campus language with local inflections

Limitations of the study Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the coincidence of this fieldwork with university vacations many of the campuses visits were undertaken without students present. Whilst this enabled relatively unencumbered access around the campus environment (save for locked buildings), human activity was largely absent, which proved to be a key determinant in the conception of the campus. As such, this thesis focusses more upon the architectural and urban composition of the campus than the potential implications on individual and collective action and sociology.

Critical Reflection This fieldwork is limited by geographic scope. Insofar as postwar changes to higher education were a global phenomenon, a comprehensive account of campuses would include further sites in Europe and beyond the West. The remit of this study is limited to the most paradigmatic exemplars of postwar campuses in the UK (i.e. the New Universities of the 1960s) and key urban institutions in Chicago. The continuation of this fieldwork should examine the relationships and implications of an international campus theory on a wider global stage.

Churchill College Cambridge, UK Richard Sheppard, Robson & Partners 1958 -

Sidgwick Site Cambridge, UK Casson and Conder 1956 -

University of Leeds Leeds, UK Chamberlin, Powell and Bon 1960 - expansion plan

University of Essex Colchester, UK Architects Co-Partnership 1964 -

University of East Anglia Norwich, UK Denys Lasdun & Partners 1964 -

University of Warwick Coventry, UK Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall 1965 -

University of York York, UK Robert Matthew Johnson Marshall 1963 -

UMIST Manchester, UK Cruickshank and Seward, Hubert Worthington, et al.

1960 -

Northwestern University sites Evanston, USA Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 1968 - RCC 1970 - library precinct

Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, USA Mies van der Rohe 1940 -

University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, USA Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 1963 -

Sidgwick Site University of Cambridge Cambridge - UK Casson and Conder

Due to the dispersed pattern of higher education as delivered at the University of Cambridge, there is no central campus for teaching, instead direct tuition is provided within colleges and at departments distributed around the city. Unlike the centralised model of teaching familiar to modern universities, i.e. collective mass learning environments at a compact campus, the Oxbridge model relies on one-to-one supervisions and small seminar groups. This model pervades today, however, post-war reformation to higher education priorities and university expansion necessitated a concentrated environment for the university’s arts and humanities faculties. Thus the Sidgwick Site was established on the far side of the river Cam from the historic colleges as a new campus for the collegiate university.

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The Sidgwick Site, built to a masterplan from Casson and Conder, began work in 1952 as a framework containing faculty buildings, staff offices and lecture halls, amongst some recreation amenities. The ‘controlling framework’ which was to guide later development of individual buildings is based on typology of the Cambridge college, whose urban form is derived from the individual arrangement of linear ranges around large rectangular courts. The Sidgwick Site masterplan shows symptoms of this ‘courtyarditis’, a label applied to the later Churchill College Competition, also in Cambridge, where most entrants returned to the familiar collegiate pattern of linked quadrangular courts to symbolise the traditional space of academia.

Despite the opportunity and the conditions to propose an ideal geometric layout over the site, which consisted of flat former agricultural land, Casson and Conder deliberately eschewed any formal axes or frontal vistas typically associated with beaux-arts campuses. Their morphological mutation of the Cambridge college type turned out to be particularly modern in its urban form, at a time when Cambridge was only just turning to reluctantly accept modernism.

In place of completely contained quadrangles, the organisation of linear blocks cranked at 90 degrees in such a way that blocks would each partially enclose courts invoked the college court arrangement without any single structure fully closing the quadrangle. As such, multiple architecturally individuated buildings contribute towards making a court as part of a heterogenous environment. Smaller special buildings are points of exception within the orthogonal layout of linear blocks. Lecture buildings form freestanding objects in space, providing deviations in the logic of the plan, they are differentiated by sculpted metallic crowns in contrast to the dark brick and concrete masses of the faculty buildings. The urban scenography therefore alternates between cubic background buildings and angular foreground buildings, united by a common landscape treatment.

At the Sidgwick Site the ground plane is preserved as a precinct formed of multiple scales, types and character of courts raised atop a permeable pedestrian plinth. Whilst the original masterplan inferred an apparently dense mat-building

configuration of closely bounded spaces typical of a Cambridge college, the raising of the faculty buildings to establish a continuous plane enables the simultaneous enclosure of the court, and the extension of the public realm beneath the blocks.

Subtle variation in the levels of the precinct act as soft thresholds to parts of the site, inferring boundaries and groupings of buildings. The central U-shaped Raised Faculty Building forms three sides of a main court whilst creating an open arcade of massive concrete piloti which act as a filter between the interior of the court and the extension of the continuous ground plane beneath.

The large main court is linked on a diagonal axis to a series of gradated courts which diminish in scale to form verdant courts on a more intimate scale. These courts are formed by the orthogonal arrangement of linear buildings which appear to slip past each other and casually abut one another, creating pockets with an altogether more incidental spatial character. The podium which the Raised Faculty Building dominates steps down to a series of small courts through minor level changes. Proceeding from one court to the next the pedestrian is funnelled through a sequence of porches and covered arcades at the entrances to each building, which creates a rhythm of compression and release. Despite its modern appearance, the spatial rhythm is similar to the undercrofts of the Inns of Court or an Oxbridge college.

The podium on which the faculty buildings are arranged elevates the public dimension of the

campus and restricts vehicles to the perimeter creating an academic precinct as a place apart. The containment of the courtyard type, coupled with the porosity of the ground plane enable situational space without compromising the accessibility of the campus, dissolving the insularity associated with the Cambridge college. Here the academic preserve is made urban by virtue of its elevation of the pedestrian.

Unfortunately, only the south area was completed according to the Casson and Conder framework and later buildings were not aligned to the cohesive urban concept initially established. The urban pattern of concatenated courts radiating from the focal main court is lost in the ill-defined space between individual monumental buildings by later architects. The coherence and sense of enclosure of the original south section of the Sidgwick Site diminishes amongst more recent buildings of fragmented orientation and morphology whose dissonance undermines the totality of the campus as a comprehensively conceived academic environment.

Fig. 1

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view along the colonnade of the raised faculty building, which sits atop a low podium exclusively for pedestrian use Fig. 2, 3

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sketch and photo of the corner of the raised faculty building colonnade and its relationship to lecture blocks, demonstrating the porosity at ground level

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Chancellor’s Court University of Leeds Leeds - UK Chamberlin, Powell and Bon

The precinct of new buildings designed for the University of Leeds by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon occupies a site which slopes away to the south of the main university campus. As one of the ‘Civic’ universities, Leeds is classified amongst other urban universities founded at the turn of the twentieth century within large, prosperous cities, such as Liverpool and Birmingham. Its original campus, atop a hill in the city centre, comprises a scattering of buildings haphazardly aggregated around the central Art Deco Parkinson Building, the figurehead of a sprawling chimera of various styles which encompasses the university’s most prestigious buildings.

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The ad hocism, and lack of overall plan, concerning the physical layout of university buildings is undoubtedly an anathema to the ethos of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon - the architects whose approach to urbanism is based on the logical organisation of a multitude of separate parts configured as a coherent whole. This was an approach to urban design which they first proposed as part of their entry to the Churchill College competition in Cambridge, and later advanced in the renowned Barbican Estate, for a bombed site in the City of London. As part of the former, the architects surpassed the competition brief in proposing the consolidation of a number of newly founded colleges into a new collegiate nucleus outside the historic centre of Cambridge. In opposition to their fellow competitor’s trend towards isolating their proposals at the centre of the competition site, analogising their entries to medieval fortifications;

Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s proposal instead created a common ground shared by the incipient colleges: a wide precinct for public and collegiate members alike. In their proposal for a generous pedestrian plaza serving the new colleges and the citizens of Cambridge, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon overturned the exclusive realm of collegiate introversion in favour of a democratised academic environment, generating the physical conditions for a meaningful interface between numerous private colleges and the public realm.

Whilst the architect’s proposal for Churchill College was not selected and therefore unrealised, the ideas of public space in the private university estate was to be actualised elsewhere, as an extension of the University of Leeds. If the architects overturned the typically inward-looking Cambridge college in their Churchill College proposal, they too resisted the institutional nature of the Leeds campus in their built designs for the university.

Where the pre-existing condition of the University of Leeds campus was defined by a unorganised mass of significant buildings compacted together into a dense plan, the new university was to be characterised as a comprehensively planned precinct foregrounded by monumental new buildings, with proper separation given from more muted background buildings. Significant buildings in the plan were to be given a meaningful setting in relation to new public spaces and other buildings, contrary to the historic campus, where a clear urban hierarchy of new buildings and spaces would bring order from the chaotic historic campus.

Chamberlin, Powell and Bon exemplify the approach of modernist architects to making space in the city. Reordering a previously disorganised urban patchwork in favour of a clearly defined, hierarchical sequence of spaces, modernist design aimed for a fully-integrated urban solution to unplanned cities, capable of reorienting and improving man’s position in society. Perhaps the archetypal spatial form capable of this edifying principle is the form of the precinct, combined with the most elevated means to this enlightenment: the university. The urban university was a fecund starting point for the architects, presenting possibilities unavailable in earlier forms of university - such as the Oxbridge colleges or even the New Universities, closed against or built outside historic towns. The potential for an open civic engagement here, in an urban environment, was to be captured in the remarkable form of the new University of Leeds campus as a public precinct; a planned interface heightening the twin conditions of campus and city.

The campus extension is laid out on cardinal axes, bisecting one another at a perpendicular crossing which forms the nucleus of the new campus, extending due North-South and EastWest respectively. The basic diagram of the campus plan extends from these two axes, one of which forms a linear spine defined by strong horizontal bands along a single uninterrupted teaching building (E-W), the other, perpendicular to this axis, ascends the dramatic topography to the old campus up grand flights of stairs, stepped in plan and section, passing through more intimate

squares and enclosed courts (N-S). One axis is characterised by the unyielding linearity of the teaching building, forming a groundscraper, and the other is characterised by exceptional pavilion buildings which converge on the crossing of axes.

In order to eschew total regularity of the plan, the axes are offset where they meet to form a ‘pinwheel’ plan radiating from a raised plaza, which acts as a centripetal point for the campus extension, and forming a new campus centre in itself.

The branch from old campus centre to new campus extension emulates the ground plan of the former as a scattering of individual buildings, gradating as one approaches the new centre into a more formal ensemble of modernist scenography.

From this approach, the architects exploit the change in topography, which falls away dramatically towards the campus extension.

Two routes become available. First; the option to descend with the slope leads down a series of wide outdoor stairs and plateaus towards the lecture room building on the main plaza, alternatively;

Fig. 4

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The lecture building exploits the topography and programme to act as a vertical circulation fulcrum, and can be accessed from multiple levels Fig. 5, 6

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sketch and photo of the continuous pedestrian route through and beneath the campus following a serial visual sequence

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the option to follow an internal horizontal corridor culminates in a network of elevated pedestrian bridges as the ground falls away below.

Internal corridor and external terrain superimpose to form a three dimensional network of routes around the campus, creating an efficient horizontal datum for circulation - a modern Vasari Corridor around the campus megastructure and mastering the topographical shift. All routes, both internal and external, coincide on the lecture room block. This clever building, the Roger Stevens Building, gathers all the incoming passages at their various levels and internalises them into an internal topography of staircases, forming a fulcrum for movement around the campus. The building draws together the circulatory strands and masterfully combines the staircases with raked auditoria which form the building’s primary programme. In a motif of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s assembly buildings, the gradient of the stairs is aligned to the gradient of the auditoria, allowing each row of seating to be accessed directly from the flight of stairs outside the lecture theatre. The spatial dynamism of movement around the campus is captured in an architectural form which derives its expression from the internal disposition of raked lecture halls and staircases.

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From the external forecourt, the Roger Stevens Building is a puzzle of interlocking forms and shifting levels, clearly an exception to the regulated and consistent architectural language of the teaching and research blocks. The outward building form is a morphological imprint of the internal stacking of theatres, at ground level the sloping soffit of the

lowest auditoria are raised above the ground plane to form recessed entrances, and covered stairs and ramps to lower plazas. The architects elevate the lecture room building typology to generate a sculptural node intertwining the ceremonial and circulatory aspects of the campus.

If the Roger Stevens Building is an exception, the long linear perpendicular wings are the rule. The anomalous but highly specific form of the lecture theatre block is foregrounded against the more uniform treatment of departmental buildings whose regularity provides a framework for indeterminacy and expansion. A grid based cluster of four closely spaced columns is proliferated along the campus axes to form a consistent spatial order. The resulting tartan grid within teaching buildings creates largespan zones for inhabitation, supported by vertical and horizontal service runs contained within the narrow grid zone of the column clusters.

The clearest expression of the repetition of the column cluster module is the E.C Stoner Building, a 200m+ long block whose consistent tectonic order forms an adaptable armature for the variety of internal infilling required to support different departmental spaces within. Externally, the order of horizontal expansion is expressed by uninterrupted ribbon windows and concrete spandrels, with depth perception provided by regular paired beam ends which project to the face of the building like centimetre markings on a ruler. This was an architectural framework designed to accommodate expansion on both horizontal and vertical axes; in the case of the former, indicated by the blank gable

end of the block which anticipates the continuation of the linear system, and in the case of the latter, by the spare ‘Joker’ floors above the occupied levels which could accommodate upward expansion of the academic programme.

The quiet ingenuity with which Chamberlin, Powell and Bon exploit the topography of the site with a singular architectonic system creates a dramatic urban ensemble of gardens, paved courts, and elevated pedestrian routes around an integrated megastructure. Whilst referred to as a campus extension, the precinct is - just as it was for their Churchill College competition submission - an extension of the city in a radical form of urbanism, providing publicly accessible spaces at the intersection of public and private domains. However, the campus extension patently neither belongs to the ad hoc conglomerate of unplanned urbanism of the original University of Leeds campus, nor does it belong to the urban tissue of the city. The Campus extension, if you could call it such, is less of an extension and more so a new centre is its own right - comprehensively planned to resist the sprawling antecedent of the main campus.

The Chamberlin, Powell and Bon campus can therefore be understood as an alternative urbanism to the main campus, and to the city, insofar as it rejects the aforementioned unplanned agglomerations and instead illustrates the urbanistic principle of rational organisation in an entity which can be understood as complete at any stage in its development. The campus is a holistic megastructure designed with co-ordinated

thinking and represents a negation of existing urban conditions. As an institutional environment which bears a relationship to the old campus and to the city, whilst simultaneously critiquing those urban structures, the campus precinct can be understood as a ‘heterotopian’ space, capable of disrupting established urban environments through its spatial alterity and programmatic singularity. The setting of distinctive buildings in relation to background buildings mimics the form of the city, exceeding that form in the actualisation of that structure as part of a master-plan, realised in a single enterprise, and subject to a conceptual framework controlling future development.

Where the New Universities studied in this series formed utopian environments, that is, ideal cities untempered by a potentially incompatible host city, the campus in the city is a heterotopia, that is, an environment consciously conceived to situate itself outside of the reality of the city, in an ideological environment of the archetypal space of edification: the precinctual university.

Fig. 7, 8

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sketch and photo of the area beneath the Roger Stevens Building where the massing is carved away beneath lecture halls at the convergence of multiple circulatory routes and levels Fig. 9, 10

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sketch and photo of the aerial and at grade routes around campus as they intersect and integrate various buildings

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University of Essex Colchester - UK Kenneth Capon Architects’ Co-Partnership

The campus of the University of Essex, designed by Kenneth Capon of the Architects’ Co-Partnership, is acknowledged as one of the most paradigmatic of the New Universities in its espousal of modernist tenets of urban design. The alignment of the ideology of the university, as set out by the inaugural Vice Chancellor Albert Sloman, with the architectural and urban concept is elaborated clearly at the campus of the University of Essex, where the campus was not so much designed as an institution, but as a new town.

The ‘map of learning’ which was to be vigorously pursued by the university founders at Essex was to not only provide the intellectual skills to a new technocratic elite - a British MIT - but also to forge, through a non-paternalistic model of residence, a ‘new man’ for the post-war era. In a conviction shared with most other New Universities, rigid departmental hierarchies were to be resisted, with this conviction manifested in the architectural configuration of the campus. Collectively, the interdisciplinary atmosphere of collaborative learning and research, coupled with a selfdetermining sociological model, established the University of Essex as the most progressive and also radical of the New Universities.

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Built in a sloping valley in the picturesque Wivenhoe Park outside the historic town of Colchester, the University of Essex Campus is conceived as a self-sufficient new town in a bucolic landscape.

Conceptually, the urban design of the campus consists of a series of elevated squares which step down the valley along the bowed axis of a

pedestrian parade, a continuous teaching building straddles the valley, turns back on itself to zig zag between the numerically-named squares. At the top of the valley, a man made lake is dammed by ‘Square 5’, or the library square, which terminates the route through the campus. Perpendicular axes radiate from the teaching wings which become linear routes between residential towers, set apart from the urban condition of the campus in a parkland setting.

Capon led the design of the campus in collaboration with the university founders and University Grants Committee adhering to the canons of modernist urbanism. Almost the entire structure of the campus is, deceptively, a single building which returns on itself to wind up the valley to enclose squares and courts. Standalone monumental buildings serving core functions are the exception to the rule. Separate residential towers are arranged on a perpendicular axis, whose distinct logic of the modernist tower-in-park typology distinguishes the realm of living from learning, despite their physical proximity.

Fig. 11

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view of Square 3 from beneath the covered colonnade - a series of consistent tectonic elements (columns, beams, mullions) form a cohesive frame to the campus Fig. 12

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three building types - the residential towers, continuous teaching structure, and ‘nonconformist’ monument (library)

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Therefore, the campus can be divided into three architectural types, which form a set of elements for potential future expansion: 1.

2.

3.

a tiered teaching framework intersected by a linear pedestrian parade individual object buildings interspersed within the teaching wings identical student accommodation towers

The megastructure which houses the university’s teaching, recreation, and administrative functions forms the urban tissue of the campus and concentrates the vast majority of the university’s programme into one continuous structure. The scale of the megastructure is such that it transgresses the morphological boundaries between architectural entity and urban agglomeration, enclosing squares, courts, and capturing landscape in the splayed extension of its wings. Departments are assembled within the continuous mat-building and linked by an internal network of corridors in such a way as to enable interdisciplinary connections - thus negating the silo-effect of segregated subjects part of the innovative map of learning promoted by the new universities.

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The mat-building is ordered on a grid, which is pinched in plan to radiate outwards following the curve of the valley below. The subtle rotation of the grid bows the whole urban assemblage, and consequently creates a crescent shaped parade, which penetrates the teaching megastructure. This curvilinear axis through the centre of the campus is formed of five square, or trapezoidal courts which

descend the valley from the artificial lake at the top of the precinct down broad flights of steps.

Each square exhibits minor variation in the overall architectural expression of the scheme: in addition to their prosaic nomenclature according to number, each square is differentiated by the colouration of spandrels in primary colours, the massing of the enclosing architecture to lend density around the square, and a unique geometric feature in each square.

The subtle modifications to each of the squares in the pedestrian precinct is evocative of Townscape planning ideals being promoted at the time, led by proponent Gordon Cullen. The urban pattern of squares and an enveloping dense urban tissue elicits references of hilltop citadels found in Italy.

Each square is lined by colonnades, or arcades where retail units are present - creating the impression of a compact community. Indeed this ambition was explicit in the minds and words of the university founders and architects, where the absence of a student union was substituted for the ‘public life of a small university town’.

Situated within three sided courts which open onto the landscape are a series of ‘individual and nonconformist’ monuments, likened to jewels by Capon, which serve the university’s more dignified functions. These elements are freestanding objects in the landscape at the frayed thresholds to the campus proper, where it transitions into the verdure of the surrounding parkland, acting as gateways and significant markers between the residential towers and the campus megastructure. Shaped

as hexagons, polygons and, latterly, ovals, these structures house key university functions such as lecture theatres, libraries and galleries according to their own unique geometric order. These constitute points of exception to the otherwise more homogenous urban fabric of the mat-building and punctuate the pedestrian procession from parkland to the plaza.

The concept of the campus is based on the strict separation, and indeed elevation both literally and metaphorically, of the pedestrian versus the concealment of the vehicle. Capon exploits the topography of the valley to submerge vehicular and service access to the campus beneath the sequence of ascending squares in a service undercroft. The piazze above, which can therefore be accessed via bridge or at grade from the spurs which descend into the valley, assume an elevated position in the overall scheme. The relegation of the vehicle in relation to the pedestrian is another tenet of modernist urbanism, which is exemplified by the Essex campus in order to preserve a landscape prioritised for parkland and the pedestrian domain.

The final tenet of modernist architecture, and final building typology yet to be examined, is the student residence tower. The tower-in-park typology, usually proposed for inner-city areas, is modified here as a novel example in true parkland setting, whose novelty extends to its application in a university scenario. As the only New University to embrace high-rise living, the University of Essex was also embracing modern metropolitan lifestyles, resisting the both the collegiate, and

corridor-based student residence models. Coupled with laissez-faire attitudes to social regulation, the towers provided the conditions for students to form small social units, and to define themselves as individuals as part of a larger student body.

At the University of Essex the design of the campus is closely aligned to the emancipatory and egalitarian project for a ‘post-institutional’ university. By designing the campus as an ideal new town, rather than an institution, the architects promoted a culture of communitarian living on one hand, whilst proposing a model city with broader implications for urbanism on the other. Achieving density through compact urban forms of the matbuilding and the tower block, whilst simultaneously intensifying both the pedestrian realm of the campus and bucolic condition of the estate, the University of Essex campus is an exemplar of modernist urban design and its synchronised view on society.

Fig. 13, 14

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sketch and photo of the topographical exploitation of the scheme - the main pedestrian route is accessed at grade from the valley, which permits an undercrofted service road to run beneath the squares Fig. 15, 16

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sketch and photo of the campus and its edge condition - the mat-building segues into a parkland condition of towers in park

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University of East Anglia Norwich - UK Denys Lasdun & Partners

The campus of the University of East Anglia is a comprehensive and self-sustaining institution located on the city fringe of Norwich, resembling an autonomous citadel in a pastoral condition.

Emerging from an era of unprecedented expansion and ambition in the planning of new universities, UEA represents one exemplar of a total environment, meaning a newly founded academic institution with a simultaneously realised campus, where the development of one would reciprocally inform the development of the other.

The modernist affixation with total planning solutions issued from a belief that only through concerted thinking on a macro scale that the issues facing postwar society could be resolved.

In the case of the new universities this belief signified a departure from the ad hocism which afflicted the redbrick universities and oxbridge, where consideration was not given to the overall strategy and structure of the university campus, only the imminent needs of the university.

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The New Universities were an antidote to this model of thinking, instead proposing fully masterplanned miniature cities with advance plans for expansion and joined up to simultaneous developments in the pedagogy of the incipient university. The emphasis was on the campus as a singular coherent entity in direct counterposition to the redbrick model.

Moreover, in addition to the campus as a foil to the redbrick type in architectural and urban terms, the New Universities were forged in a postwar emancipatory era of state-funded higher education,

and therefore sought to reverse the elitism which pervaded prewar higher education.

This context manifested a remarkable campus at UEA. Designed by Denys Lasdun in concert with the university founders, an Academic Planning Board (APB) of the University Grants Committee, prospective academics and local stakeholders, UEA like its New University contemporaries represents a broader spectrum of society in its cultivation from national politics to local community.

Notwithstanding this broader engagement, the New Universities were all built on greenfield sites at the peripheries of historic towns, enabling their realisation as autonomous enclaves for academic pursuit, rather than fully integrated campuses.

UEA was built on a sloping site west of Norwich city centre, even today the campus has yet to be encroached upon by the city around. The campus, as realised, represents the first stages of

Fig. 17

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view of a small pocket of space around the central cluster of buildings - forming a spatial counterpoint to the immensity of spaces elsewhere on campus Fig. 18

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view of the teaching wall from the aerial pedway serving the residential ziggurats. a large pedestrian platform for access to the teaching wall is raised over building services and vehicles

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a potentially extendable framework for expansion, but still - in its partial completion - is perceptible as a complete campus. It is a gestalt, despite unrealised further phases. The challenge of the New Universities were numerous. In urban terms, the campuses had to appear to be complete for the arrival of the first cohort to uphold a semblance of longevity, whilst also functioning as a self-sustaining system even whilst construction was underway on later phases.

In the design for UEA, there are a number of architectural parts which form a framework for development. This inventory of parts consists of four elements: 1.

2.

3.

4.

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Linear spine building for teaching Cellular ziggurat buildings for student accommodation Freestanding monuments housing primary functions (library, union, etc) Elevated aerial pedways for circulation

The main buildings are clustered around a central amphitheatre in a more amorphous arrangement, imitating a nucleated piazza and adhering to fashionable Townscape principles. Whilst the linear spine buildings and ziggurat buildings form two parallel wings which branch out from the amphitheatre and bow around to bracket a large prairie lawn and lake to the south. The central amphitheatre evokes a modernist rendition of an Italian hill town, with tiered platforms stepping from the main entrance axis of the university, down to a south facing bowl enveloped by key communal

buildings. This amphitheatre is the fulcrum of university life, forming a centre for the student’s needs and a place for encounter.

Zoned apart from this precinct is the teaching wall and residential ziggurats, which project from the centre along radial arms. Teaching and living run roughly parallel in tendrils out from the centre maintaining an unusual programmatic proximity to one another. In an era when zoning of functions was considered the paragon of enlightened planning, the close proximity of life and labour is radical, notwithstanding their separation by a service road between the two wings.

Teaching, accommodated in the canted teaching wall, is integrated into the parallel student accommodation in the famous ziggurats by raised aerial platforms and pedways, which form an outdoor elevated concourse for circulation.

Adhering to another canon of modernist planning - the separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic - the pedways are raised high above the service streets below, favouring the former. As consequence most teaching levels are accessed from the first floor, whilst the living accommodation in the ziggurats is accessed from a staircase descending into the building from the top floor.

The ziggurats, perhaps the most memorable form, are organised on a 45 degree axis (a Lasdun motif) with a staircase which steps down along the terraced section to give access into the student rooms. The staircase model, pervasive at Oxbridge, provides recognisable familiar social units with

which a student can affiliate with a coterminous spatial limit. Individual ziggurats are aggregated into long ranges of which two were realised, forming a man made outcrop at the crest of an expansive lawn.

By employing a system of repetitive or extendable parts Lasdun incorporates a logic for expansion.

The idea driving which would mean that future additions did not regress to ad hocism but could be seamlessly incorporated into the concept of the campus without undermining its integrity.

In theory, the number of ziggurats could proliferate and the length of the teaching spine elongate without eroding the coherent image of the campus.

According to the original masterplan, the wings of ziggurats were serried so that they would converge on the established nucleus of the campus, rather than extend indefinitely outward. This was a concept driving the masterplan of the ‘five minute university’ where the urban form of the campus could be so compact as to ensure the centre could be reached on foot in five minutes.

This ambition - to a compact university - brings us back to the original objectives of the New University campuses. To foster a sense of community and local microcommunities from the critical mass of students at the university. Furthermore, the ambition to resist the incrementalism of the redbrick with a strategy for future expansion, whilst also creating an identifiable and condensed microcosm, were paradigmatic goals of the postwar university campus.

Fig. 19, 20

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sketch and photo of the raised walkway between the teaching wall and residential ziggurats - the service street below is planted with evergreens to form a perennial buffer between spaces of living and learning Fig. 21, 22

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sketch and photo of the central amphitheatre which concentrates activity at the nucleus of the campus - pictured is the multifaith centre, which forms one of a number of freestanding monuments which cluster around the edge of the space

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University of Warwick Coventry - UK Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall

One of the lesser recognised new universities in architectural terms, the University of Warwick is also the most ‘routinely’ modernist in the layout of the plan on an architectural and urban scale according to a regular grid. Such was the intention of the original architects, Yorke Rosenberg Mardall (hereafter YRM), whose experience in designing large technical infrastructures, such as Gatwick airport, was applied to the task of organising a new university campus.

The original design plan, of which a small fraction was realised, differed from the more self-contained university megastructures such as UEA and Essex, where the campus was consolidated into a singular architectural form. In opposition to the comprehensive brutalist campuses whose forms inferred a potential additive expansion into landscape and townscape-inspired arrangements, a principled rationalist grid was employed as a universal framework, from the urban to the architectural, controlling future development on an orthogonal grid. Apparent at every scale, from the grid planning unit, to the 6m structural grid, to the grid elevation treatment, and even at the detail scale of the white tile grid, this unifying ordering device organised the campus into a totality based on an all-encompassing regulating system.

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Initially, the campus at Warwick was to incorporate an extensive network of wide aerial pedestrian streets, raised over vehicular traffic below, which were to integrate the main academic buildings at first floor level, arranged along a principal circulatory spine. YRM’s original models and

drawings show a pedestrian network connecting zoned building clusters, segregated from service roads and car parks at ground level. The logic of separation was taken further, to separate academic buildings from residential buildings. Mid-rise tower blocks in dense clustered formations were located at the end of aerial pedways, towards the perimeter of the site, nevertheless, the student would not have to set foot on the ground in their route from their residential tower to the pedestrian spine, where larger academic buildings were arranged perpendicular to the main axis.

Whilst the enormous plan was never realised to anything near its planned extent, a number of key principles were retained; namely the clear zoning of academic and residential buildings and the gridbased organisation. However, most damaging to the campus plan was the omission of the elevated pedestrian plane at first floor level, resulting in a compromised arrangement which placed both pedestrians and vehicles at ground level.

In opposition to the dominant trend for vertical separation of vehicles and pedestrians. The central axis aligning key academic buildings was retained at a much diminished scale, with the priority given to vehicular traffic, generating a contested relationship between primary building entrances and service roads, only one aerial pedway was built.

In the absence of the raised pedestrian concourse, the interface between departments is restricted and interdisciplinary communication impeded, resulting in the somewhat inferior aesthetic regard granted to the Warwick campus in relation to the other New Universities.

However, this outcome is hardly surprising, in light of the more specialised pedagogy pursued by the original university leaders. Where other New Universities experimented with novel combinations of departments into larger schools, encouraged their students to undertake interdisciplinary studies, and overlapped academic and social lives in colleges, Warwick was to pursue no such integration. It was decided that ’the university will not attempt to interweave teaching with the units of social organisation which are proposed’, a distinction which explains the zoning of the site into defined sectors for residential and academic purposes. Students were to be housed in halls away from the academic site, and indeed the nomenclature ‘hall’ was eventually dropped due to its affiliation with the collegiate model of education.

If the map of learning pursued by Warwick was more straitjacket than its contemporaries, the rationalist architecture of YRM was to incorporate this pedagogical logic into physical form. Eugene Rosenberg of YRM insisted that ‘it will not be possible to give physical recognition to individual schools of studies in the plan’, a statement which resonates with the abstract appearance of the Warwick campus architecture, an uncompromising modernism organised by the isotropic application of the grid logic. Like Essex, individuation of departments was to be resisted, and what little was built of the original campus is a monument to the serial application of a consistent spatial module.

The geometry which has been applied at all levels had, in the architect’s minds, elicited a unified totality of a comprehensive campus based on the

underlying order of the grid. However this rather doctrinaire rationalist modernism was already outmoded by the time the academic zone was nearing completion, and like many universities the architecture became a source of contention.

In the climate of student revolt in the late 1960s, the uniformity of the campus was interpreted as conformity on the part of the student body who, amongst other things, resisted the lack of social spaces at the university and the architectural expression of the campus. The inadequacy of existing social spaces, such as the so-called ‘airport lounge’, had failed to generate a meaningful and comfortable social environment, compounded by the lack of a student union building. Following a period of unrest, both these issues were addressed, in the commission of a student union building and a distancing from the uncompromising rationalism of YRM’s architecture.

Fig. 23

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the campus consists of a uniform framework dictated by a consistent structural grid, which governs the plan, section and elevational arrangement Fig. 24, 25

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sketch and photo of the multiple planning grids employed across the campus YRM’s orthogonal grid is counterposed by a the diagonal grid of later buildings

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Later additions to the campus gravitated around YRM’s Rootes Hall, an array of halls of residence arranged in a zielenbau formation. The new precinct compensated for the lack of social and cultural buildings within the original phase, supplying an arts centre, gallery and student union building partially enclosing a wide plaza. The new buildings, dating from the 1970s, discard the universal grid of the YRM architecture in favour of dynamic agglomerative forms based on a triangulated ‘field theory’. For instance, the new student union is arranged by the overlapping of a secondary diagonal grid, whereby the superimposition of different spatial fields generates irregular geometries, in opposition to strict orthogonality of the preceding YRM scheme.

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Two final points are worth mentioning concerning the Warwick University campus, the first being the distribution of art in relation to modernist architecture. Eugene Rosenberg was a believer in the reciprocity of art and architecture, and its societal value; a relationship enhanced by the abstract regularity of YRM’s architecture.

Rosenberg, ‘architecture is enriched by art and that art has something to gain from its architectural setting’. The seriality of the YRM campus establishes a neutral canvas to the outdoor sculpture, inverting the white cube gallery setting containing art, into an outdoor setting of art set against white cube architecture. An extensive collection of site-specific artwork punctuates the spatial experience of the campus, creating an openair sculpture park in dialogue with the campus architecture.

Perhaps more significant than the YRM campus in architectural terms is a small village of houses designed for visiting mathematicians by the practice HKPA. Employing an earthier new brutalist language of brick and concrete in comparison to the YRM white tile signature, this concentric collection of individual villas is ensconced at the perimeter of the site, surrounded by woodland. 6 houses united by a radiused brick wall encircle a copse of trees (now removed), creating an idyllic garden for peripatetic scholars. Here the totalising logic of the universal grid is fully rejected in favour of an introverted community cluster, providing a more humanistic alternative to the potentially infinite modular system of the main university campus.

Fig. 26, 27

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sketch and photo of the union building realised as part of the second phase - the forecourt to the union is stepped to form an amphitheatre Fig. 28

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view to the entrance of the chemistry department - pictured is the only realised aerial walkway in the campus

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University of York York - UK Andrew Derbyshire RMJM

In opposition to its contemporary universities, whose urban patterns sought to concentrate university life at the nuclei of their respective campuses, the University of York’s chosen model of collegiate dispersion was an academic principle reflected in the design of the campus. York, whose aspirations for the new university was to ‘establish a university of the status of Oxford or Cambridge’ was to have a fundamental collegiate structure, but with an unprecedented ethos of egalitarianism, openness, and inter-collegiality not associated with its aspirational forebears.

Like the other New Universities, the site for the University of York was a former country estate at the fringe of the city - Heslington Hall and Estate whose already established landscape was to form the picturesque condition for the new university.

The site was varied topographically, bisected by a marshy lake, and interspersed with mature copses in the English landscape tradition, forming a bucolic idyll as the pre-existing condition for the new institution. Proposed by architect Andrew Derbyshire of RMJM, the plan was in contrast to the kind of centripetal megastructure proposed by the architects of the other New Universities, such as UEA’s groundscrapers or Essex’s mat-building.

In fact, the plan was wholly non-urban, and instead focused on the relationships between the colleges and main university buildings dispersed at nodes around the landscape.

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The plan envisaged a series of collegiate centres scattered as clusters on a constellation of pathways mapped over the topography of rolling hills and

lakes. Orbiting the Central Hall, as an origin point in the plan, a web of meandering routes would emanate out to link the small collegiate villages sited on the banks of the lake, where the routes would there intersect with the college buildings, passing through en route to the next one. Expansion could be easily accommodated by adding another node to the network and linking it to other nodes. The plan appears disintegrated in relation to the formal ‘urban’ structuration of other New Universities, yet appears to encapsulate the academic organisation of the collegiate university in its architectural organisation.

The composed casualness of the arrangement, where colleges emerge out of the mature landscape like pavilions and recede as lakeside follies, seemed to be an appropriate response to both the picturesque estate and the academic organisation of the university. It was the Cambridge ‘Backs’, where colleges face on to the river and meadows, which was established as a scenographic precedent. The plan attempted to generate a coherent environment on a macrocosmic scale, where other campuses attempted to generate a concentrated form on a microcosmic scale. Nowhere on campus is the entire arrangement visible in its totality. As such, the logic of the university is not so immediately apprehensible, resisting a monumental identity, and encourages perambulation to understand the relationship of parts to the whole.

The efficient movement of people and its potentially performative aspect was a key tenet of modernist space, and became an organisational

armature for many postwar universities, with the circulatory spine often conceived as the physical and conceptual vertebra of the campus, compare Bath, Lancaster. By organising the University of York campus along a trail through a rhythm of open landscape and collegiate courts, the architects created an environment where movement in space and time came to the fore of the experience of the campus.

The coherence of the campus in the landscape is achieved by the pedestrian route through parkland which, although presenting multiple options to possible routes, is orchestrated by a covered walkway which converge on the Central Hall. From the Central Hall as an origin point, the network of paths radiate into the landscape forming curvilinear loops towards the colleges embedded in the landscape. A lightweight colonnade offers a covered path, whilst free-standing where it passes through the wooded areas of the campus, the covered path intersects with the colleges, drawing various university members through the colleges en route to their destination. This processional collegiality is a sharp contrast to the closed insularity of the Oxbridge college, which form metaphorical cul-desacs rather than permeable thoroughfares.

The processional route through the campus is internalised through the colleges, wherein it acts as a street along which the college functions are aggregated. The linear route bifurcates to form smaller branch routes through the college courts, forming colonnades, cloisters, and internal passageways which give access onto residential

staircases; the more labyrinthine path network in the colleges creates spatial knots and slows movement through the campus whole. The passing visitor find themselves witness to college life when moving through the campus, passing by college foyers, refectories, halls, bars and common spaces whilst in transit to their own college. This was an explicit aim in the mission of the University of York, to dissolve the hierarchy and cellular tradition of colleges in favour of an accessible communality.

Visually the colleges all appear to form part of a greater whole, owing to their material uniformity due to the CLASP modular panel system. The use of this systems building method, whilst primarily for expediency, ensured that the various colleges did not erode the essential integrity of the university as a whole, so that they may form part of a collective identity. Here the York collegiate model digresses once again from the Oxbridge, with the emphasis on the entire community, where the college is an affiliative social unit within the broader society of the university. Although self-governing, the colleges at York are not hegemonic institutions, with one critic Fig. 29

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view to the main square which abuts the lake edge at the convergence of multiple campus pathways Fig. 30, 31

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sketch and photo of the pathway which intersects college buildings to create colonnades around courts and forms a link between landscape and architecture

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stating ‘nowhere else did concentrated thought about what a university ought to be like in a modern democracy come so close to finding physical expression’.

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The colleges, realised uniformly in the CLASP system, form a regulatory logic to the campus.

Their visual consistency forms the rule, to which select university functions provide the exception.

Notable buildings such as the Library and the Central Hall are visually distinguished and occupy pivotal positions in the landscape, flexing their architectural muscularity beyond the constraints imposed by the CLASP system. These primary buildings are nodes on the plan, and collect the paths of communication into gathering points. In the forecourt to the library, the change in level and convergence of pathways is managed by a ramped helical courtyard in which students orbit around a sculpture on their ascent to the library, emerging on-axis with the entrance. This orchestration of movement reveals the conception of such to be more than simply a matter of efficiency, but rather something to celebrate. A lakefront square forms the forecourt to the Central Hall, which creates a university commons in addition to devolved collegiate commons in their satellite locations.

In this central position, movement is arrested in a static point from which the student can orient themselves in relation to the rest of the university, as if at the immobile centre of a clock face.

Unlike the displacement of urbs into rure which characterised the ‘urban’ New Universities set on creating compact miniature cities in the countryside, the University of York is a plan whose

objective of dispersal is no less amorphous. The York campus plan operates conceptually on the scale of an entire landscape estate adopting the form of a constellation, whilst simultaneously atomising the form of the university into apparently small follies in the landscape. The arrangement of college buildings, which appear to owe their disposition to Structuralist forms, resemble parts of a large mat-building, which have been fragmented and distributed around the park. However, of course here each fragment is a college community, and therefore a complete entity in its own right. The consequent totality to which the college buildings amount to - due to their similar urban layout, and an identical architectonic system - coheres the dispersal of the colleges into a rational whole.

It is in this sense of a campus which is at once dilating and contracting, centripetal and centrifugal which reinforces the relationship between people and movement, architecture and topography: establishing York as a true academic landscape, a campus in the proper sense.

Fig. 32, 33

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sketch and photo of the pathway around a college - the pathway serves to unite tie the colleges into the wider network of the university Fig. 34

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view across the lake to the central hall where the pathway around the campus is itself wrapped up and around the upper level of the hall as an outdoor gallery

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Northwestern University sites Evanston - USA Walter Netsch Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Northwestern University comprises a neo-gothic campus located north of Chicago proper, although it lies within the wider Chicago area, it is most directly related to the separate city of Evanston.

The campus is bracketed from the south-east by the city of Evanston, and to the east by the shores of Lake Michigan, with which the campus has a direct relationship. Unlike the two other US university campuses studied here, Northwestern’s campus was not formed as part of a newly established institution on a tabula rasa site; for much of the university campus was already established and the university itself was formed in 1851. The university can still be considered urban, by virtue of its proximity to Evanston, notwithstanding the physical separation of the neo-gothic campus from the city by means of expansive lawns, wide building curtilages and landscaped areas which dissociate the campus from the city.

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In the postwar period, when the university recognised the global demand for expansion in higher education, the requirement for physical campus expansion was deemed necessary.

However, the proximity of the university to the city of Evanston, in particular the affluent residential areas in which the campus was located, proved a major barrier to new development. Residents in the streets surrounding the university were resistant to its expansion towards Evanston. The university found itself in a dilemma whereby it could not satisfy the need to expand without compromising either; its civic responsibility to the local citizenry, or sacrificing its extensive landscaped setting on the shores of Lake Michigan, which abutted

the campus immediately to the east. The solution was characteristically radical for the period. It was decided that the university would purchase 152 acres of land beneath Lake Michigan from the State of Illinois, in order to create an artificial headland called the Lakefill Project.

The Lakefill Project would serve to reorient the campus, which historically had addressed the land-side as seen from the city, in the direction of the lake, opening up prospects out to the horizon, therefore giving the university a new frontage. The project was led by Walter Netsch of SOM, architect of the UIC Campus and US Air Force Academy campus, who oversaw the land engineering project and was commissioned for a number of new buildings in both the city site of the campus and on the newly created site on the Lakefill. Netsch’s masterplan for the campus extension initially overlaid the city grid onto the newly-reclaimed landscape, proposing a series of raised platforms and precincts which would meld into a more fluid landscape on a new lakefront esplanade. The finalised plan as built introduced an inlet of Lake Michigan within the scheme, to form a lake-within-the-lake. An artificial dam separates Lake Michigan from the lagoon, looking out to the Lake and the city on the horizon, and looking in to the Lagoon and the campus. The curvature of the artificial lake counterposes the rectilinearity of the proposed building clusters. This more benign lagoon ensures that the relationship between the original campus and the lake - and therefore the university’s image as a lakeshore campus - remains integral to its identity.

As for the remaining footprint of the Lakefill, Netsch apportioned the land to distribute new building precincts around a generous landscaped park. Pinwheel clusters of buildings characteristic of Netsch provided localised centres within the campus extension, forming smaller nodes within the overall campus plan. The masterplan is conceptualised as precincts in the park, smaller formations of buildings at local centres separated by parkland in a manner reminiscent of the York campus. This thinking was apparently to retrospectively rationalise the more haphazard arrangement of buildings of the neo-gothic campus in a more legible arrangement of clusters, each of which could be individuated so as to retain a particular style, without compromising the unity of the campus as a whole. This scheme aimed to integrate plurality and unity - e pluribus unum.

The second building to be designed by Netsch has the most immediate relationship to Evanston of any Northwestern University buildings; the Rebecca Crown Center (RCC) was designed to consolidate the university’s main administration. Located inland at the head of Orrington Avenue, which the City truncated for the university to create the site for the new administrative centre. The centre and its distinctive campanile are visible from the main square in Evanston, terminating the view along the avenue. The axis of the avenue is continued into the site wherein it divides from an elevated central quadrangle, known informally as the Sandbox, opening up multiple routes into the campus. From the elevated quad, a pinwheel organisation of routes through cloistered walkways direct movement

between the city and campus, acting as a filter between the two domains. Three main buildings linked by a covered colonnade enclose the quad, with its fourth corner anchored in by the campanile.

The traditional connotations of the quad type are subverted by the pinwheel arrangement, which gives the impression of building masses which shift and react to the mobile observer in the space, opening up views of the landscape beyond through the open colonnade.

Architecturally, the RCC melds the pre-existing neogothic architecture of the Northwestern University Campus with Netsch’s brutalism. Heavilyarticulated masonry elements create deep relief and a highly modelled facade with elements which resemble finials and buttresses. The repetitive vertically-emphasised elements which order the facade in sandy masonry tones evoke the vertical emphasis of the perpendicular style, revealing an affiliation between the neo-gothic campus and the new brutalist language of the RCC. Changes in level are accommodated within the a cloister zone, Fig. 35

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view across the square to the library entrance ‘lantern’ which connects the new library ensemble to the original neogothic library Fig. 36, 37

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sketch and photo of the RCC complex where a cloister partially enclosing a square manages circulation and acts as a filter zone between city and campus

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and double up as sheltered seating areas creating an undercrofted circulation and assembly area for the administration centre. The cloister acts as the filter between the elevated quad of the RCC and the landscaped campus beyond, forming a route from the city to the main lake-side area of the campus.

Within the lake-side area of the campus, a number of Netsch’s buildings form pavilions in the landscape, interspersed amongst existing neo-gothic buildings and atop the new Lakefill grade. Nested amongst a series of neo-classical and neo-gothic pavilions in the landscape of the main campus, Netsch’s largest complex reworks ideas from the RCC to align with his evolving ‘field theory’. The Northwestern University Library bears traces of the organisation of the RCC but develops the architectural concept of interconnected blocks on a pinwheel using a diagonal and rotational logic. Fundamentally, in massing terms, both the RCC and library complexes comprise three large rectangular buildings around a central precinct with a connecting colonnade or corridor.

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The library precinct is an extension to the existing Deering Library, but instead of a singular building extension instead it is composed of three ‘towers’ or blocks raised over a service plinth which doubles up as a square. Each tower is linked by a diagonal corridor axis raised over the plinth; at the convergence of all three corridors, a vertical core tower manages circulation between the service sub-level and each block whilst housing a cafe at plinth level. Similar in respects to the RCC, the Library sits atop the plinth and acts as an elevated

quad, accessible from all directions through undercrofts which link respective buildings. Also arranged as a pinwheel around a quad, the library introduces a rotational ‘field theory’ to each one of the towers.

Netsch’s ‘field theory’ which developed simultaneously with the library involved the rotation of one form within another as a mode of formal and spatial composition. This nascent theory was applied to each tower at the library. Netsch took each square in plan and rotated it about its centre to array its external corners, creating a rounder sawtooth plan. Within the library, this rotation is apparent in the sunken reading room rotunda at the centre of each tower, from which columns radiate outwards to manifest the field theory in action. By leaving the interior of the library towers largely open, the effect is most apparent on the facade, whereby the radial logic of the field theory generates the appearance of a building in rotation.

Reading carrels which rotate about the facade to project out at the building corners and are jettiedout further every floor up present a conflictingly static and fortified weight combined with a dynamic and centrifugal force, creating a composition which appears frozen in movement.

Externally, the library precinct offers an open area in which to appreciate the conceptual logic of the field theory, although this effect is muted by the otherwise cold and reserved elevations whose windows are limited to slots where the carrels are jettied over the quad. The success of the space is in its porosity to the landscape around it. Processional

staircases rise up from the landscaped parkland to the elevated plinth level by passing beneath the diagonal planes of the corridor links overhead, the transition from amorphous landscape to the scenographic precinct presents an acutely distinct spatial experience orchestrated by the change in level, condition, and organisation. From within the precinct, the raised ground floor of each tower enables views through the field of columns to the landscape and lakes beyond, yet the sense of enclosure is salient. The series of thresholds at level changes in both the RCC and library precinct are effective filters between the distinct conditions of the landscape and the condition of the precinct.

Netsch employs bridges and cloisters and pairs them with level changes to inform the user of the space of a change in condition to the heightened space of the precinct.

In both Netsch’s major architectural projects for Northwestern, the external-space-within is charged by enclosing outdoor ‘rooms’ with a dynamic formal envelope. In the case of the RCC, the pinwheel plan organisation orients the user to areas beyond the colonnade, which acts as a filter between city and campus. In the case of the library precinct, diagonal and rotational forms suggest motion itself, yet their organisation in plan nevertheless centres on the external quad between the main library towers.

In the RCC and library project, the division of programme into separate yet interrelated buildings enables the creation of a central quad which gives back to the space of the campus and the city encouraging movement beyond the intramural limit of the isolated building.

Fig. 38, 39

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photo of the library precinct approach with sketches illustrating its plan based organisation - three main masses are raised atop a pedestrian plinth Fig. 40, 41

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sketch and photo of the library precinct as a great outdoor room enclosed by a compositional spatial envelope - the raised quad conceals the library’s service spaces beneath

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Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago - USA Mies van der Rohe

Situated due south of Chicago centre, the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology is one of the most complete and emblematic campus environments of the 20th Century. Product of the architect Mies van der Rohe, who directed the department of architecture after the closure of the Bauhaus, the IIT Campus was a lesson in the the architect’s own theory of ‘universal space’ and Miesian urbanism.

IIT is located on State and Dearborn Street, parallel streets which form a linear axis from the city to the campus, extending the universal Chicago grid southbound to superimpose an invisible order over the site. The campus site along major infrastructure routes into the city had been designated a ‘blighted’ zone, which enabled its total redevelopment for the expanding Armour Institute, later to become Illinois Institute of Technology. Only the original building of the Armour Institute was retained, otherwise a tabula rasa condition would be imposed through the demolition of all structures over the site, which encompassed multiple city blocks, displacing existing residents to nearby housing projects.

The newly levelled site, with the exception of the remaining solitary building bore no traces of a previous condition, or palimpsest, other than the vestigial grid of roads which bisected the new campus superblock.

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The planning of the campus was derived from a schematic operation in which the dimension of all parts of the overall campus, major or minor, would be determined by the size of the smallest components, working from furniture dimensions to the scale of

the campus. This operation through the scales, working from the inside-out and from the smallest element to the largest, reflected the Miesian rationalist understanding of space, adopted from industrial architects derivation of structure from the dimensions of industrial machinery. Following the basic spatial requirements of the schematic operation, the technological order and structural grid of the campus could be extrapolated with a direct relationship to the activities which informed its properties and frequency. At the IIT Campus, the optimal structural module was identified at a 24ft square grid extended indiscriminately over the site. Rather than begin with an ideological stance apropos the idealism of the university which prevailed in postwar campus planning, the IIT Campus was planned primarily through the technological vehicle of structural and spatial planning which in itself is indifferent to the purpose of higher education.

This basis of space reflects the Miesian concept of universal space, which would enable freedom of use by the university and thus unlock the utopianism of the campus. This theory holds that a clear span architectural skeleton is the minimum and therefore the optimum form for accommodating changing uses throughout a buildings lifespan. While this theory finds its proper expression in column-free interiors, such as Crown Hall (the department for architecture), the spatial indeterminacy provided by a minimal tectonic armature on a grid also provided opportunity for future modification with little resistance. Whilst the 24ft grid was considered a universal device for setting-out the structural grid

and layout of campus buildings, exception was made for Crown Hall, whose free plan interior reifies the theory of Universal Space. Within the hall, space is partitioned within the continuous interior to form localised pockets of activity informally enclosed by furniture-like elements.

The interior arrangement of Crown Hall is a miniature of the campus as a whole. The hall is a topology - an activated spatial field - which compresses at points of intensity and event and is rarefied in areas to form clearings within the relational space of the interior. As consequence, the interior urbanism of Crown Hall can be understood as a key through which to understand the campus as a whole: as an ordered and rhythmic field punctuated by incidental moments of compression and rarefaction, activation and dissipation. Universal space, such as the non prescriptive interior of the hall, is not so much about the extension of space as much as it is about the maximisation of potential use. The regulatory logic of the planning grid controls the hand of the architect, yet the hand of the user is free to use space as they wish.

The initial campus plan proposed two symmetrical arrangements of buildings mirrored over a transverse street (33rd), which crossed perpendicular to State Street. Two ostensibly identical rectangular buildings faced one another across a defined quadrangle bisected by 33rd Street, whilst smaller elongated building forms were shifted in plan on either side of the main buildings to enclose the sides of the quad from State Street. The mirrored plan created a balanced but static composition of

buildings only enlivened by the irregular forms of the auditoria which projected into the space of the quadrangle.

As the campus planning continued in tandem with Mies’ tenure at IIT the symmetrical rigidity of the masterplan began to transform into a less formal but nevertheless balanced composition.

In later iterations of the plan, as a larger site became available, the spacing and regularity of the arrangement began to loosen to favour an alternating spatial arrangement where the figure ground would flip between figure and void with a less predictable rhythm. Throughout Mies held to the grid field imposed over the site however, as specific spatial requirements for individual buildings became apparent, Mies allowed individual building footprints to extend or contract, offset by a few squares on the grid so that building forms would appear to slip past one another. While maintaining the logic of the grid inherent to both the internal organisation of the campus and the city equally, the internal logic of each piece of the campus puzzle revitalised the grid which had stultified space in the city.

Fig. 42

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campus structures consist of rationalist forms and variations on a consistent tectonic system Fig. 43, 44

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sketch and photo of the campus as ordered by the orthogonal grid but experienced on the diagonal

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The more the masterplan deviated from the symmetry of the original plan, the more rhythmic the relationships between landscape and between buildings became. Buildings were prised apart, and space which was initially bounded and firmly enclosed was extended to segue from one quadrangle to the next through their open corners.

Marginal overlap between buildings gave a semblance of the archetypal academic quadrangle, yet the prairie like expanse and diagonal views between buildings diminished the static formality of the plan. The final campus plan as built has an open grid form where space floods around the campus building, whose interrelationship resembles boats moored in a harbour than firmly locked buildings on a campus. Forms which drift past each other pinch space and create a relational value which reaffirms a cohesive campus quality, yet simultaneously drift apart into space.

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The most surprising absence at the IIT Campus is that of a physical boundary to the estate. Where other campuses define the extent of the academic enclave through wall, change in condition, or building arrangement, the IIT Campus is open to its environs, rendering it a porous environment and suggesting the extension of its spatial field.

Indeed, the conscious extension, or proliferation of Miesian urbanism trialled at the campus can be found in localised moments within the city proper.

The spatial arrangement of buildings which are offset in plan to create diagonal rather than strictly parallel alignment would characterise Miesian projects in Chicago. From municipal precincts and plazas, to residential tower complexes, to

commercial building clusters, the informal slipped plan transposed the spatiality of the campus to the city manifesting a different kind of universal space.

The planning of the IIT Campus was more than a mere operation in space planning, but a manifesto in how the grid of the American city could evolve to activate the orthogonal space of the grid with oblique movement and dissolution of a hard street edge. The campus internalised the city grid but in the place of rigid geometries which defined a hard street edge, open space was allowed to permeate the campus superblock to equate landscape to architecture. For Mies, IIT was a lesson in how campus planning could reform city planning in a test environment, which he later implemented in many urban schemes in Chicago proper. By adhering to the city’s cardinal grid, and deconstructing its totalising properties, Mies demonstrated how simple deformations on a plan could substitute formal axiality of the American street for the diagonal movement across a city block, how unrelenting linearity could be substituted for the liquid qualities of space, and how the metronomic rhythm of the isotropic street grid could be syncopated through spatial compression and release.

Fig. 45, 46

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sketch and photo showing how each building is surrounded by a wide landscape curtilage Fig. 47

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view of Crown Hall, which consists internally of one large span interior

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University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago - USA Skidmore, Owings and Merill

The University of Illinois at Chicago, UIC, represents a counterpoint to the New Universities in England studied in this thesis. On face value, the New Universities and UIC are ideologically similar: in both instances the campuses are miniature urban structures newly built in the postwar period to provide a higher education to a populace whose access to university education had been historically withheld. In the case of UIC, the stated objective of the university was to provide higher education to the ‘urban proletariat’, sharing the English New University mission of democratising access to university. However similarities between the respective missions of the universities across the Atlantic are largely a product of a global trend towards improving access to higher education, and the differences in approach between newly founded English universities and American universities reside primarily in their extramural condition and relationship to a host city.

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In contrast to the English New Universities, UIC and other Chicago institutions of higher education sited their campuses within an urban environment.

Nevertheless sharing the utopianism of their English counterparts, UIC and its contemporaries proposed radical urban renewal projects in the city.

The campus for the University of Illinois at Chicago would be designed idealistically as an ‘academic oasis in the center of a great city’. If Chicago is known by the mantra urbs in horto, i.e. city in a garden, the campus would invert that condition in creating a garden in the city, hortus in urbe.

Throughout its development, the architect’s plans for the campus preferred a high-density complex of

buildings which would reserve large areas of land for lawns, courts and groves between compact building clusters and standalone towers. Reading this proposition as a question of landscape urbanism, the UIC Campus posits an alternative form of city design than the unrelenting isotropic grid of the Chicago Loop.

The design of the campus was led by Walter Netsch of SOM, already recognised for his designs for the US Air Force Academy Campus, whose layout of buildings organised by a grid of vast parade grounds and raised platforms set the tone for the UIC Campus. Initial proposals for the campus largely internalise the existing city grid which is superimposed over every parcel of land stretching from the city centre to beyond the city limits. The campus adopts the grid as an organisational device ubiquitous in Chicago, however it deforms its totalising qualities by using it as an invisible matrix on which individual buildings could be selectively shifted, rotated and re-arranaged. In contrast to the city grid, the campus grid is non-deterministic, using it as a compositional framework to modify space in order to create diagonal axes and pinwheel layouts which have an inherently dynamic spatial condition. From an aerial perspective, both campus and city conform to the logic of the grid, however the experience on the ground is markedly different; at UIC, the grid is merely a setting-out instrument rather than its spatial representation. As such, the campus relates to the city, but suggests an alternative use of its all-encompassing frameworks which privileges open space and landscape, rather than the maximum exploitation of the grid.

Despite the orthogonal logic of the grid, Netsch likened the concept behind the UIC campus to a ‘drop of water scheme’ where the campus would be organised by a set of rings radiating from the campus centre at Circle Forum. Like the plan of the Loop - Chicago’s concentric loops which emanate from the city centre - the UIC Campus would gradate from dense, dispersed, to landscaped conditions in a reflection of the real urban condition through the virtual urbanity of the campus. This manifested architecturally in a pinwheel scheme ordered by the processional routes and platforms which traversed the campus. Raised over an undulating landscape scheme, the platforms provided an immense network of elevated pedestrian concourses which integrated all the main campus buildings, providing direct access at first floor level. Perhaps the most powerful image of the campus is fostered by these aerial walkways, whose significance in integrating the entire campus by a network of raised pedways, was lost with their demolition. Today, the concentricity of the campus idea is supplanted by a more traditional sense of a campus whereby standalone buildings cohere into a campus-whole by their consistent relationship to a landscape.

was punctuated by amphitheatres, and seating exedrae which would concentrate student life on a great elevated plane. Beneath the forum plaza, amongst a great hypostyle of columns, lecture centres orchestrated the flow of students in and out of ‘teletoria’, which pioneered AV lectures for a modern society. Where the immensity of the Circle Forum charged the life of the university in a condenser of intensity, more intimate spaces could be found in the casual clusters of low rise buildings in the next ring out. The formality of the Forum dissolved amongst the clustered networks of teaching buildings dispersed within the landscape, which remain today and provide a loose structure and defined boundaries to the landscaped lawns between. This duality of immensity and intimacy, mediated through the architecture of the campus, served to enable the individuation of the student within the mass environment of the university, by providing small and large spatial units which would assist their assimilation into a greater social entity. The campus was designed to be at once ‘compact and capacious’, fostering ideas of nested communities within the university.

Echoes of the lost platform system remain on the campus, which is now experienced primarily from the ground level. Terraces and loggia which once received the bridges between buildings remain today as a testament to a humanistic idea to elevate pedestrian movement on the campus. The raised platform system converged on the Circle Forum of the campus, which centred on the locus of Netsch’s ‘drop of water’; here, an immense plaza

Fig. 48

previous page

an avenue at ground level formed by the lecture buildings, formerly the route was covered by the raised Circle Forum Fig. 49, 50

this page

photo and sketch of the main routes from the campus centre - pinwheel formations typify the plan with large processional axes radiating from the centre

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Initial campus buildings were designed according to the grid system, in which monumental rectangular forms were distributed amongst the landscape. In this ordering logic, the irregularity of the spaces between regular buildings would provide the spatial dynamism which supports the vitality of the academic community. This logic gave way in later phases of the campus development to Netsch’s own Field Theory. Under this theory spatial dynamism could be generated by a simple architectural manipulation of rotating square forms in plan within themselves, in order to establish orthogonal and diagonal orientation within buildings. Simply described as a 45 degree rule, Field Theory substituted the urban irregularity of dynamic spaces between buildings for the architectural irregularity of dynamic spaces within buildings. The formality and monumentality of early UIC buildings segued into the rotating and angular organisation of later buildings, most notable is the Science and Engineering South Building, whose undercroft assembles students and orchestrates movement from many approach directions and levels in a more dynamic fashion than the orthogonal arrangement of early campus buildings.

The rotational logic of Netsch’s theory is manifested in the splayed beams on the soffit of the undercroft.

Situated further out from the campus core due to their later development, the field theory buildings demonstrate a point where the 90 degree grid logic of the campus centre disintegrates towards the campus edges.

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The overall coherence of the University of Illinois at Chicago, although significantly diminished by

the demolition of the multi-level platform system, still retains a resilient unity of parts to the whole. In part through a considered landscape scheme, the dispersal and concentration of buildings around points of intensity is integrated under a common treatment of the landscape. This conceptual environment of the campus was designed to embed landscape in the city, and reform the city grid to privilege the pedestrian. The belief of the architects and planners in this system led to the conception of schemes such as UIC as not merely a ‘piece of the new city; it was the new city’. The campus was promoted by political leaders as a model for urban development outside of the limits of the university, in promoting an alternative to the existing organisation of the American city. In the United States, more so than in England, city planning and campus planning reciprocate to the extent that exemplars of the latter were considered prototypes for the former. This fulfils the potentiality of the urban university, as an environment capable of positing alternative forms of urban renewal beyond the confines of the campus.

Fig. 51, 52

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photo and sketch demonstrating the concentric scheme - local building clusters foreground larger monumental buildings closer to the campus edge Fig. 53

next page

the soffit of a passage through the SES building demonstrates Netsch’s Field Theory where the rotation of a building form generates dynamic spatial arrangements

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Part 2

Sketchbooks

Fig. 54 Sidgwick Site on-site sketches Cambridge, UK - June 2021 19x25cm

B

A

A B C D E

Raised Faculty building plan, open colonnade level Raised Faculty Building, porous ground plane Incrementally diminishing courts Columnar field Colonnades infer enclosure and create small urban moments

C

E

D

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Fig. 55, 56 Chancellor’s Court on-site sketches Leeds, UK - September 2021 19x25cm

A

B

A B C D

Tartan structural grid Main axis through the campus unfolds a scenographic route through and under buildings Social Science building elevation at the threshold to the original campus Basic cruciform campus plan

D

C

1 of 2

A B C D E

Section showing multi-level scheme separating served and servant spaces Cruciform campus plan centred on the Roger Stevens building Undercroft of the Roger Stevens building at the convergence of main routes Multi-level scheme view showing routes around ground level and internal elevated corridor Pinwheel spatial arrangement centred on the Roger Stevens building

B A

C

E D 2 of 2

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Fig. 57

B

University of Essex on-site sketches Colchester, UK - July 2021 19x25cm

A

C

A

B C D E

Conceptual campus arrangement; squares on axis parallel to the valley, towers on perpendicular axis Silhouette of the campus evoking an Italian hill town on the landscape Cut through view of a square, court and service undercroft Overview of the campus as a mat-building with peripheral towers-in-park Field and figure concept D

E

Fig. 58 University of East Anglia on-site sketches Norwich, UK - May 2021 19x25cm

B A

A B C D

Plans of Founder’s Green and the main amphitheatre View of the main amphitheatre as a space which concentrates and amplifies activity Section through raised pedway over service street Plan and section diagrams of the Ziggurats’ internal organisation

C D

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1 of 2

Fig. 59 University of East Anglia on-site sketches Norwich, UK - May 2021 19x25cm

A B C D E

A

Formation of ziggurats around a wide field Section through teaching wall, raised platforms, and residential ziggurats Internal staircase arrangement within ziggurat Conceptual campus organisation Relationship between teaching wall, raised platform, and ziggurat

B D

C E

2 of 2

Fig. 60 University of Warwick on-site sketches Coventry, UK - August 2021 19x25cm

B A

C A B C D

Plan of new campus buildings arranged on a diagonal axis Interface of perpendicular (original) grid buildings and diagonal (later) grid buildings Different grid organisations (including radial) on the campus View of the student union and external amphitheatre

D

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Fig. 61 University of York on-site sketches York, UK - September 2021 19x25cm

A

B

A B C D

Pedestrian route through the college and landscape Smaller spatial enclosures feed on to a large open court Internalised route through the college which divides to form colonnades and courtyards Constellation campus plan

D

C

Fig. 62 Northwestern University on-site sketches Evanston, USA - November 2021 19x25cm

B

A

A B C D E F G

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View of enclosed spaces in the RCC, with the campanile marking the fourth open corner Orthogonal pinwheel plan arrangement of the RCC Diagonal pinwheel plan arrangement of the library Comparative plan diagrams of the RCC and library Field theory operation on a rotated square form View of the library precinct as an organised building cluster Fractal pinwheel formation

G C F

D

E

Fig. 63

C

Illinois Institute of Technology on-site sketches Chicago, USA- November 2021 19x25cm

A B C D E F G H

Original campus plan Campus plan as built Spatial compression and release in the space between buildings View showing informally defined court structure Crown Hall as a ‘field interior’ of localised events View of the campus whole Diagonal views to courts and lawns beyond Organisational diagram around Dearborn Street

A

B

E

D F

H G

Fig. 64 University of Illinois at Chicago on-site sketches Chicago, USA - November 2021 19x25cm

B

A

A B C D E F

Radial drop of water campus concept where each ring has a distinct architectural typology Cluster of buildings shifted off alignment on the grid Elevation of a repetitive tectonic module Framework for expansion by adding building clusters to a pedestrian spine Fractal pinwheel arrangement of main urban spaces View of Circle Forum as initially built

E

C

D

F

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Part 3

Photographs The pairing of photographs here infer links between the campuses studied, illustrating common architectural and urban design philosophies shared by campus planners. Certain spatial, architectural and relational traits between campuses of the New Universities in the UK and urban institutions in the USA are unified by a suggested category for each pairing.

1 2 3 4 5

1

Elevated pathways

Fig. 65

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Elevated pathways Common ground Captured landscape Artificial topography The space between and beyond

University of Leeds

Fig. 66

University of East Anglia - UEA

Fig. 67

University of Essex

Fig. 68

Northwestern University

Fig. 69

University of Leeds

45

2

Common ground

Fig. 70

University of East Anglia - UEA

Fig. 72

46

Fig. 71

University of Leeds

University of Essex

Fig. 73

University of Illinois at Chicago - UIC

Fig. 75

Fig. 74

University of Illinois at Chicago - UIC

Northwestern University

47

3

Captured landscape

Fig. 76

Fig. 78

48

University of Essex

Fig. 77

University of Leeds

Sidgwick Site - University of Cambridge

Fig. 79

Fig. 80

Illinois Institute of Technology - IIT

Northwestern University

Fig. 81

University of York

49

4

Artificial topography

Fig. 82

Fig. 83

50

University of York

University of Leeds

Fig. 84

University of Leeds

Fig. 85

Fig. 87

University of Illinois at Chicago - UIC

Fig. 86

Northwestern University

University of East Anglia - UEA

51

5

The space between and beyond

Fig. 88

Fig. 90

52

University of York

Fig. 89

Northwestern University

University of Leeds

Fig. 91

Sidgwick Site - University of Cambridge

Fig. 93

Fig. 92

Sidgwick Site - University of Cambridge

University of Illinois at Chicago - UIC

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Part 4

Fieldwork Itinerary DATE

ACTIVITY

INSTITUTION

November 2020

Case study - Churchill College

Churchill College

November 2020

Interview - Profesor Nick Bullock

December 2020

Document - The Courts at Churchill College Cambridge

December 2020

Lecture - Churchill College: Origins and Contexts

N/A

March 2021

Lecture - England's Post-War Designed Landscapes: University Landscapes

N/A

March 2021

Interview - Professor Peter R. Green

N/A

May 2021

Case study - University of East Anglia

University of East Anglia

Norwich UK

June 2021

Case study - Sidgwick Site

University of Cambridge

Cambridge UK

July 2021

Case study - University of Essex

University of Essex

Colchester UK

August 2021

Case study - University of Warwick

University of Warwick

September 2021

UK Fieldwork residency

September 2021

Case study - Chancellor's Court

University of Leeds

September 2021

Case study - University of York

University of York

September 2021

Archive - University of Manchester Special Collections

University of Manchester

Manchester UK

September 2021

Archive - Manchester Metropolitan University Visual Resource Centre

Manchester Metropolitan University

Manchester UK

September 2021

Site documentation

UMIST

Manchester UK

September 2021

Site visit - Eamonn Canniffe

UMIST

Manchester UK

October 2021

Presentation - talk given to MSA A&U students on the UMIST campus

N/A

October 2021

Interview - Professor Richard Brook

N/A

November 2021

Guest critic - MSA A&U UMIST campus research methods and design reviews

N/A

November 2021

US Fieldwork residency

November 2021

Case study - University of Illinois at Chicago

University of Illinois at Chicago

Chicago USA

November 2021

Case study - Illinois Institute of Technology

Illinois Institute of Technology

Chicago USA

November 2021

Case study - Northwestern University sites

Northwestern University

Cambridge UK Cambridge UK

Churchill College

Cambridge UK

Coventry UK Manchester UK Leeds UK York UK

Chicago USA

Fig. 94

54

LOCATION

Evanston USA

next page

view of Founder's Green at the entrance to the UEA campus

Research Thesis

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Spaces of Edification — The Campus as Urban Theory and Design Concept

This document records the outputs of a fieldwork period of study as part of a wider thesis which examines the physical form of the postwar university campus in the UK and US. Through the primary method of written, photographic and drawn case study analysis, this fieldwork study collects information from a year long period from winter 2020 - winter 2021.

Benjamin Carter

Fieldwork Report

Cambridge Design Research Studio Department of Architecture University of Cambridge

cambridge-design-research-studio.com/carter benjamin-carter.co.uk benjamescarter@outlook.com

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Research Thesis