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

Benjamin Carter This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MPhil examination in Architecture and Urban Design

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

Thesis

MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design — University of Cambridge

Benjamin James Carter This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MPhil examination in Architecture and Urban Design 2020 - 2022 Declaration This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text.

Research Thesis Gonville and Caius College University of Cambridge Submitted: 12 January 2022 Word count: 14, 880 Keywords campus planning, modernism, postwar university, precinct, urbanism Abbreviations Comprehensive Development Area CDA CLASP Consortium of Local Architects Special Programme Education-Industrial Complex EIC Free University /Freie Universität Berlin FU Higher Education HE Illinois Institute of Technology IIT Manchester Education Precinct MEP Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT University of East Anglia UEA University Grants Committee UGC University of Illinois at Chicago UIC University of Manchester Institute of UMIST Science and Technology Victoria University of Manchester VUM other universities are referred to by their eponym, e.g. the ‘University of York’ is abbreviated to ‘York’

Acknowledgements I am grateful to those who helped shape my interest in the field of campus planning prior to and during the undertaking of this research. I would like to thank especially; Richard Brook and Eamonn Canniffe at Manchester School of Architecture, for their enduring support and perceptive insight into this project since its inception. Ingrid Schröder, director of the MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design programme, for granting me the opportunity to pursue this interest and, in particular, for her ability to elucidate the crux of this research when it was obscure to me. Beyond this thesis, I have learnt much about the pedagogy and purpose of higher education from this course and her direction. Within the Department of Architecture my gratitude goes to my tutor Aram Mooradian and supervisor Felipe Hernández, for honing the design and research rationale of this thesis, our conversations are always formative.

I owe my thanks to others for their contributions to this project, particularly Nick Bullock and Peter R. Green for offering their intelligent comments.

My thanks extend to those whose critical input has shaped this research and its parallel design component; Anna Andrich, Nicholas Simcik-Arese, and Emily So at the University of Cambridge, and to critics Liam Ashmore, Fabrizio Bellabio, Umberto Bellardi Ricci, Alex Butterworth, Peter Carl, Matthew Critchley, Julika Gittner, Daniel Koo, Hugh Pidduck, Evan Saarinen, and Emma Woodward. Further gratitude is due to my mentors Stephen Connah and Stuart McGrath for their support of this project at various stages, thank you for the kind words. To the friendship of those on the MPhil programme, for our conversations and our solidarity in labouring through the difficult periods of the pandemic. Finally, I am very grateful to Gonville and Caius College for their generosity in sponsoring the fieldwork component of this thesis.

Spaces of Edification The Campus as Urban Theory and Design Concept

Benjamin Carter

Contents Abstract Introduction

Chapter 1

Hypothesis of a Campus The University Campus as a Comprehensive Project

7 8

15

1.1 1.2

Urbs in Rure — Ideal Cities of Intellect The Urban Theory of the New University Campus

18 22

Chapter 2

Urban Interiors — The Microcosm within the City

31

2.1 2.2 2.3

Rus in Urbe — The Garden in the Machine The Spatiality of the Urban Campus The Field as an Architectural Project

34 38 45

Coda Conclusion

List of Figures Bibliography

Implications of Campus Theory The Campus beyond the University

53 58

60 62

Fig.1

cover image Roger Stevens Building at the University of Leeds - a monumental architectural ‘figure’ integrated into the urban ‘frame’ of the campus

Fig.2

frontispiece Irene Manton Building at the University of Leeds - aerial walkways across site levels unite architecture and urbanism into an integrated physical environment

Fig. 3-13

opposite page campus case studies conducted during the fieldwork period of this thesis top row university expansion projects middle row the New University campuses bottom row urban university campuses

Campus Case Studies

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 -

6

Abstract

Research Thesis

Spaces of Edification Abstract Fig. 14

HE

The phenomenon of the Knowledge Economy, which harnesses the production and transmission of information, is increasingly recognised as an agent in stimulating urban change.1 The physical environment most emblematic of this phenomenon is the university campus, whose relevance to urbanism is beginning to be apprehended after a history of withdrawal from the condition of the city. Notwithstanding positive or harmful consequences, the evolving relationship and closer affiliation between campus and city is transforming the latter into ‘Knowledge Cities’, parallel to a complementary trend in the former toward the ‘UniverCity’ - revealing how the respective missions of modern higher education and urban renewal are becoming increasingly interdependent.2 This thesis examines the relationship of the campus to the city, as physical proxies for themes of university ideology and urbanism, explained through the organisation of the campus itself. As small cities, the campus in the city is an analogous form; spanning the scales of architecture and urbanism whose disposition mimics the structure of the city at large.

previous page

The University as a total environment. UIC, in Chicago is an urban institution with its own conceptual logic and pattern of urbanism.

The architecture and urban theory of the university campus is examined through exemplary case studies from the postwar period in the UK and US. This period in particular represents the time at which the aspirations of state and society elided with an unparalleled utopianism in higher education.

This was manifested in England in the creation of the New Universities, which offered a carte-blanche for experimental modes of living and learning. These new institutions were designed as ideal towns in the country, self-sufficient polities unencumbered by existing urban conditions. Rare examples of urban universities in England emerged in the postwar period, and one case study will be examined in further detail as a locus for theoretical and applied urban design studies. The following chapters segue from the ideological conception of the campus as a total environment, to the application of campus design theory - a field condition - on the scale of both architecture and urbanism, concluding in a speculative hypothesis for how campus planning contributes to urban design, to be implemented through the subsequent design element of this thesis. Throughout this thesis, the built environment will be considered as a lens to examine extra-architectural themes, attempting to define a concept of a campus as a general theory and demonstrate its physical application in the design of cities.

footnotes 1

The Knowledge Economy was conceptualised in the 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society although the concept is attributed to preceding economists. cf. Peter F. Drucker, op. cit., 1st edn (New York: Harper & Row, 1969)

2

Campus and the City: Urban Design for the Knowledge Society, ed. by Kerstin Hoeger and Kees Christiansee (Zurich: GTA Verlag, 2007), p. 13.: for harmful consequences of university expansion see, Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are plundering our Cities, 1st edn (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021), pp. 6-7.

7

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

Research Thesis

Hypothesis of a Campus

University campuses — particularly those of the New Universities — are microcosmic representations of a society, where the holistically planned environment establishes the preconditions for the evolution of that society.

On the level of the individual and the collective, university campuses are thus examples of a total environment which contain the possibility of being didactic in their own right: informing behaviour and providing the formative conditions for individual self-realisation and collective action.

8

Hypothesis of a Campus

Research Thesis

Introduction As self-contained environments adhering to an internal logic and spatial organisation, university campuses are often considered on their own terms. The territory of a university campus tends to occupy a finite area, spatially delimiting the extent of a self-governing institution in relation to another circumambient condition. In the prehistory of campus planning as a discipline, the university was conceived as a state of exception relative to their host cities, often segregated or situated away from the realities and distractions of the city in a preserve of academic autonomy. For the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the atomised structure of the university dispersed amongst groups of colleges largely determined the present plan of the city, despite the separation of the colleges from the citizenry and the interstitial city fabric. Over time, the urban fabric which constrained the expansion of the colleges was sacrificed as they grew, until a compact pattern of the collegiate core emerged whereby the colleges could expand no further. The boundaries which contained the sequestered enclaves of the colleges doubled up as permanent structuring elements in the greater city plan - this physical separation of city and college was reflected in the metaphorical ‘town and gown’ dichotomy. Although the colleges cannot accurately be described as campuses, it reveals the earliest conception of what Pevsner terms the ‘universityscape’ as a place apart from the cityscape whose appearance it nevertheless dictates, eliciting a clear division of public and private materialised in a coterminous spatial frame.3 The polarised relationship of town and gown in the ancient examples of Oxbridge describes a historical condition where the finite and confrontational domains of the city and colleges divide the representation of the city; into the urban on the one hand the institutional on the other. Since these earliest examples of universities in England, the respective missions and physical form of academic versus urban space were considered mutually exclusive. From the collegiate antecedents to the campus model known today, the architecture and institutionality of the university, that is, their physical and representational qualities, were interconnected and often conceived in relation to an other: in the case of Oxbridge, of the colleges in relation to the city.4

Fig. 15

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the exclusivity of academic space persists in postwar colleges: separation from the street is achieved at Churchill College, Cambridge by means of a wall, a ‘moat’, change in level and a defensive gatehouse concealing the college within.

Prior to examining the politics of city-campus relationships, it is first necessary to make a number of distinctions and definitions. Whereas the aforementioned ‘college’ refers primarily to a group of people united in common purpose, preceding its categorisation as a physical environment, the physical materialisation of academic space came into being with the term campus, which unlike the institution of the college is embodied in an exclusively 3

Philip Booth and Nicholas Taylor, Cambridge New Architecture, 3rd edn (London: Leonard Hill Books: 1970), p. 6.

4

In The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College Muthesius explains the capacity of university buildings to convey meaning in the reciprocity of ‘architectural image and institutional life’. Stefan Muthesius, op. cit. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 2.

9

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

Research Thesis

corporeal presence.5 The apparently oppositional state of campus and city is inscribed etymologically in the word itself: where the term campus derives from the latin word for ‘field’, originating in early purpose-built university campuses in open fields in extra-urban areas.6 This thesis does not define the campus by its nomenclature alone, in fact the nominal association of a university campus to a field or parkland setting is, to an extent, inconsequential. This thesis posits that a campus can be realised and clearly perceived in urban environments as much as rural settings. For the purposes of this thesis, the definition ‘campus’ requires a reconceptualisation which dissociates the campus from its common conception of buildings in a park landscape or extra-urban setting. Instead, a fully resolved campus should be interpreted as an urban concept and an urban form regardless of its location. This basis of definition, which favours the inherent organisational structure of the campus conceptualises the campus as a total environment realised according to an overarching concept.

Fig. 16

Even within the field of university planning, definitions of a campus vary from the literal and tangible; Muthesius inherits the definition of the campus as ‘any group of academic buildings belonging to one institution’, to the ideological and symbolic; Kerr describes the campus as a ‘City of Intellect’, representing the ‘great machine’ of the university.7 Inconsistent definitions of the campus are inevitable, as a campus is, in the Muthesian sense, a collective noun for buildings with a common purpose; serving as a medium for higher ideas of society after Kerr, accommodating many definitions in between. Due to the pluralistic interpretation of the campus on many scales, this thesis asserts no authoritative statement presupposing a singular definition, instead offering a tolerant hypothesis to be scrutinised throughout this text. This hypothesis is:

The campus is fundamentally an organised physical environment which operates on the scales of architecture and urbanism simultaneously, incorporating an overarching concept and purpose.

In addition to its physical attributes, a campus is a symbolic representation of an institution, conveying how the organisation and government of the university is manifested in a physical form. Therefore, this thesis considers a dualistic conception of the campus; on the one hand, as a physical environment, and on the other, as a complex system and symbolic form.

10

5

Tim Rawle, Cambridge Architecture, 2nd edn (London: André Deutsch, 1993), p. 70.

6

The archetypal campus as a university in a field is at Princeton, NJ, United States (1756). The neology ‘campus’ was applied because of the location of the first buildings in an open field separating the university from the eponymous town.

7

Stefan Muthesius, The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) p. 60.: Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 5th edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 92-95.

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UIC - Chicago: The postwar campus as a total environment - a comprehensively conceived environment designed to an overarching concept

Hypothesis of a Campus

Research Thesis

The campus alone is a symbol of the university which acquires a political dimension when brought into contact with a physical other. If, as Aureli states, the ‘task of architecture is to reify […] the political organisation of space’, then in no apprehensible medium is this task more acutely rendered than in the form of the urban campus, which ontologically elicits both intramural and extramural confrontation.8 Within the scope of this thesis, political relationships are understood on two levels. First, the external confrontation of academic space to its environs, whether that condition is a landscape or urban condition; such as, in the case of the latter, the conflicting politics of the Oxbridge colleges and city, exemplified by town and gown divisions. Second, the internal relationship between constituent parts within the campus, which in spite of their common purpose, comprise sometimes incompatible or factional elements. The campus is thus understood in reference to the political relationship to its surroundings, in addition to the political conditions within the campus. Politics in this sense refers to the root form of the term polis - referring to the spatio-relational conditions of the city - and indicates a comparison between physical patterns in the city and their analogous patterns in the campus. In its use hereafter the political is conceived in terms of the relationships between entities in city and campus urbanism. In particular it refers to the relationships of nested parts within an overall whole, or of an entity in conflict with an other.9 Even in rural settings the campuses of the New Universities (as satellite sites removed from historic towns) do not exist in a political vacuum, separation itself is a political choice. What this premise establishes, as shall be examined through case studies in the proceeding chapters, is that the campus is symbolic of the polity of the university, actualised and expressed through its physical composition and extramural relationships.

Fig. 17

Owing to their large scale, campus case studies will be examined primarily through the lens of planning and urban theory, rather than architecture alone. Planning for postwar society was considered a comprehensive enterprise in the 1960s, representative of a belief in the state intervention and utopian ideals.10 Urban planning was at once the act of organisation of architectural elements on a groundplan, and also a vehicle for societal improvement, upheld as a modus operandi for all echelons of civic and institutional reform.11 Insofar as the campus is an urban form which could be described in terms both literal and 8

Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Writing Architecture Series (Cambridge: MA, MIT Press, 2011), pp. 41-42.

9

The requirement for a common ‘ground or field’ as a precondition to political perception is recognised by Rowe and Koetter in their critique of the modernist city. See Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City, 1st edn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), p. 64.

10

Otto Saumarez Smith, Boom Cities: Architect-Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)

11

In West-Germany the reciprocity of the university and institutional reform was captured in the neologism ‘Reformsuniversität’

above

aerial view of the Circle Forum at UIC, the sunken amphitheatre and four seating exedrae on an elevated platform acts as a democratic arena for the university - the political space within the campus Fig. 18

above left

diagrammatic urban structures left extramural political relationships between constituents of the university in relation to equivalent structures in the city right intramural political relationships between constituents of the university

11

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

Research Thesis

ideological, political and symbolic, planning is the correlative process by which cities could be restructured by means both physical and societal. For postwar planners, the form of the campus represented a microcosm of larger issues of modern society and an experimental field in which to test prototypes for schemes for comprehensive urban renewal and new town development. This was a belief epitomised in statements that for architects ‘there seemed virtually no difference between a university plan and a city plan’ in an architectural sense, whilst ideologically-speaking there was a parallel conviction that ‘as a whole the university is the chief problem of modern society’.12 This thesis focusses in particular on the postwar period when campus and city planning were closely aligned under the umbrella of institutional and urban reform. In this period both scales of planning assumed disciplinary autonomy for the first time, establishing a technocratic basis for planning supported by academic research.13 The principle of architecture and urbanism deployed as the apparatus of the state and universities in service of modern society is what I term the principle of edification; tethering the architectural dimension (from aedificatio, i.e. the act of building) to the purpose of civic enlightenment in the term’s conventional meaning.

This principle of edification, encapsulated in the belief that the spheres of architecture and society, when fully conceived to reciprocal advantage attains a special significance as resolutely human endeavours, is realised in the convergence of postwar democratised higher education in a societal sense, and the potentiality inherent in the architecture of the university campus.

Edification introduces further significance to the given hypothesis of the campus; which is that beyond its organisational and institutional condition, its symbolism derives from the fact that the campus represents the society of the university. As a utopianist project, the New Universities of the postwar period espoused the highest aspirations of society, and simultaneously embraced the democratisation of higher education for marginalised populations, and therefore represent the apotheosis of the edifying principle posited in this thesis.14 This principle is articulated in terms of the built environment, which explains why, despite their similar purpose, the private enclaves of the Oxbridge college is Fig. 19-20

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UIC - Chicago: Spaces of Edification. The UIC Campus is open to its urban environs permitting free movement across the site

12

12

The first quotation refers to Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s Churchill College competition entry and their similar proposal for a higher density suburb. The second is quoted from Walter Gropius. Stefan Muthesius, op. cit. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 67, 36.

13

Nicholas Abercrombie, Ian Cullen and others, The University in an Urban Environment: A Study of Activity Patterns from a Planning Viewpoint (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 1-2.

14

cf. Peter G. Rowe, Civic Realism (Cambrigde, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 34-35.

Hypothesis of a Campus

Research Thesis

not a space of edification, whilst the open form of the urban university precinct is a space of edification. The distinction resides in whether a space may be considered civic or humanistic.

The premise thus far established is that the university is a utopianist project when considered in its own right.15 When considered in relation to an other, such as the city, the symbolic qualities of the university campus have the capacity to realign the institutional condition of the university towards the civic conditions of the city. For urban universities, the campus becomes a simulacrum of the city and presents political potential by confrontation. In themselves, university campuses - particularly those of the New Universities - are microcosmic representations of a society, where the holistically planned environment establishes the preconditions for the evolution of that society.

On the level of the individual and the collective, university campuses are thus examples of a total environment which contain the possibility of being didactic in their own right: informing behaviour and providing the formative conditions for individual self-realisation and collective action.

In the principle of edification, the potential of an environment to be utopianist relies on the hybridity of architectural ideas and societal ideas, whereby the degree of alignment between the two can render a complete vision of society both physically and virtually. The measure of success depends on the transmission of knowledge within and without the limits of the university campus, whilst retaining a distinct political autonomy. Under the aegis of a powerful institution such as a university, spaces of edification can be created ex nihilo, as shall be examined in the first chapter of this thesis. In the case of the New Universities of the 1960s, the capacity of the university to be utopian is examined due to their unique spatio-temporal conditions. In the case of urban institutions, where the urban condition of the university confronts the urban condition of the city as a counter-site, the possibility of the university to be heterotopian is proposed.16 Heterotopia, meaning ‘other place’, is the Foucauldian concept through which the urban university is herein understood, in relation to an other.17 Fig. 21

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University of Leeds precinct - the campus as an ‘other city’ positing an alternative urbanism to the city itself

15

‘Utopianist’, after Muthesius, is understood as the process of realising utopian conditions through tangible built forms. As utopia are nominally non-existent, ‘utopianist’ better describes the real implementation of ideal environments. See Stefan Muthesius, op. cit. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 5-6.

16

For a comprehensive definition of heterotopia see, Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, October 1984, pp. 3-9.

17

Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, ed. By Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (New York: Routledge, 2008)

13

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

Research Thesis

What follows is a three part study of university campuses to a host condition, and the associated physical, spatial, and ideological themes established under the category of edification. This thesis examines the symbolic and relational space of the university interior, and the political conditions of its exterior. First, the English New Universities are examined in order to understand the conception of the campus as an idea as much as a physical environment: this chapter establishes a general theory of the campus type. Second, urban universities in Manchester are examined with respect to the political and heterotopian definitions previously established. The formal analysis from chapter one is extended to incorporate a civic dimension to the urban university; furthermore this rationale is evidenced through an active design element which investigates the post-institutional potential of the campus after the departure of the university. Where chapter one establishes a general theory of a campus, chapter two applies this theory as a design strategy on an architectural scale. Third, the analogous condition of campus and city is scrutinised in international case studies, establishing conclusions as to the potentiality of campus theory to the built environment. In sum, the hypothetical campus definition posited in this introduction is critiqued through design experiments and research drawing on fieldwork case studies, refining the thesis question which asks: how is a campus like a city?

Fig. 22

14

opposite page

model of the University of Essex campus proposed in its totality. despite the partial completion of the teaching wings, and the construction of only six towers, the campus attains a cohesive urban condition

Chapter One The University Campus as a Comprehensive Project

15

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

University of East Anglia

University of Essex

LOCATION Norwich, UK DISTANCE TO CENTRE 2 miles ESTATE Earlham Park ACREAGE 272 acres PLANNING TYPE serial megastructures UNIVERSITY TYPE unitary RESIDENCE TYPE halls of residence in ziggurats ARCHITECT Denys Lasdun & Partners FIRST VICE CHANCELLOR Frank Thistlethwaite COMMENCEMENT DATE 1964

LOCATION Colchester, UK DISTANCE TO CENTRE 2.5 miles ESTATE Wivenhoe Park ACREAGE 204 acres PLANNING TYPE mat-building, tower in park UNIVERSITY TYPE unitary RESIDENCE TYPE co-living apartments in towers ARCHITECT Kenneth Capon, ACP FIRST VICE CHANCELLOR Albert Sloman COMMENCEMENT DATE 1964

Fig. 23, 24

16

Research Thesis

this column

top view of the end gable of the linear ‘teaching wall’ overlooking founder’s green, at the entrance to the campus below realised extent of initial masterplan

Fig. 25, 26

this column

top view of the campus library which rises above the urban fabric of the campus, whilst the topography drops away below realised extent of initial masterplan

Research Thesis

University of York

LOCATION York, UK DISTANCE TO CENTRE 1.5 miles ESTATE Heslington Hall ACREAGE 187 acres PLANNING TYPE dispersed campus UNIVERSITY TYPE collegiate RESIDENCE TYPE study rooms in colleges ARCHITECT Andrew Derbyshire, RMJM FIRST VICE CHANCELLOR Eric James COMMENCEMENT DATE 1963

Chapter One

Case Studies

This chapter examines the relationship between the idea of the university and the architectural conception of the campus by extrapolating common urban theories from three of the seven New Universities established in the 1960s in England.18 Within the scope of this study, the utopianist aspirations of university planners are demonstrated through the high-level planning and design decisions at each campus, in order to demonstrate the principle of edification firstly, in the academic planning of the university, and subsequently in the urban planning of its campus. ‘Urban’ in this context refers to the analogy of the campus as a city per se. On the level of university ideology and campus design, each environment is assessed apropos of the relational and representational qualities which render it a cohesive campus, and due consideration is given to the campus in relation to its extramural environs. The criteria for the selection of the three campuses is based on achieving a balance of different ‘maps of learning’, academic organisation, architectural typology, and a governing planning theory, in order that common themes can be deduced from heterogenous exemplars of postwar campus planning to develop a general theory of a campus.

18 Fig. 27, 28

this column

top collegiate building embedded in the lakeside picturesque landscape below realised extent of initial masterplan

The popular neologism ‘New University’ equates to contemporaneous descriptions which emerged to define a common category for the postwar state-founded universities. Alternatively known as the ‘plateglass universities’: Michael Beloff, The Plateglass Universities (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968)

17

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

Research Thesis

1 — The University Campus as a Comprehensive Project 1.1 Urbs in Rure

UGC

18

Ideal Cities of Intellect

The postwar New Universities are physical monuments to a period of massive expansion and democratisation in higher education in England. The seven newly formed institutions, the Universities of; Sussex, York, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Warwick, and Lancaster, are products of a ‘state experiment’ in government sponsored higher education and university foundation at a national scale, unparalleled in magnitude by any educational programme prior or since.19 Whilst overseen by the University Grants Committee, a branch of the Treasury, each university was granted considerable autonomy to design their own programme of study and institutional ideology, entitled the ‘map of learning’ by Asa Briggs, Vice Chancellor of the University of Sussex.20 Furthermore, each university was charged with the appointment of an architect to produce a masterplan for the physical environment of the university - its campus. Such an enterprise in the concerted planning of de novo institutions at the highest level of their organisation in tandem with the built environment of the campus reflects considerable consensus between government, university leaders, and architects. This synthesis of state utopianism and HE democratisation in a reified form reflects the principle of edification acutely in the design of the campuses of the New Universities. Each history of the seven New Universities is a saga of its own, and cannot be recounted in detail here.

The primary concern in this chapter is the environment of the New University campus itself and how this reflects university ideology in the form of architecture and urbanism. However, several ideological precepts directed their formation and are elaborated here prior to a comparative examination of the urban design of the campuses.

19

Utopian Universities: A global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s, ed. by Jill Pellew and Miles Taylor (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), p. 77.

20

Matthew Cragoe, ‘Asa Briggs and the University of Sussex, 1961-1976’, in The Age of Asa: Lord Briggs, Public Life and History in Britain since 1945, ed. By Miles Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

1 The University Campus as a Comprehensive Project

UEA

Research Thesis

Returning to the previous definitions of a campus as theorised in the introduction, the origins of the term campus in the etymology of the word ‘field’ gain relevance once again in the campuses of the New Universities. Each of the seven New Universities were deliberately situated outside of historic towns in accordance with the directives of the UGC, who reviewed hundreds of local bids for candidate sites. The prerequisite area of 200 acres for the New University sites effectively precluded the realisation of any new institution in an urban setting, where the cost of land acquisition would have been ‘prodigious’.21 The planning decision to situate the New Universities in extra-urban settings of country estates or peripheral landscapes was not merely economical but also ideologically rooted in postwar planning doctrine which favoured comprehensive solutions to societal problems. Referring specifically to the University of East Anglia, it was determined that ‘it was more important that the university should be in a comprehensive site than it should be in or near the heart of the city’ despite the provision of valid sites in nearby Norwich.22 The withdrawal from the condition of the city into the country placed the New Universities within a ‘conservative version’ of academic space which corresponds to the principles of the private Oxbridge college rather than a public institution.23 That is, of a university insulated from the distractions of external urban conditions in its own academic enclave. Symbolically, the locational separation of the campus and city is further emphasised by the nomenclature of the New Universities, which in the main adopt county or regional names rather than that of the host town. The conception of the campus here is that of an autonomous satellite city which is nominally related to a local city yet oriented primarily inward on itself, or far outward to a national catchment.

Fig. 29

Underlying the formation of the New Universities is the reversion of the idea of the university to ancient archetypes not only in the separation of the campus from the city, but additionally in the emulation of its academic organisation. Of the seven New Universities, York, Kent and Lancaster adopted a collegiate structure, which subdivided the university into the smaller social units of the college, associated with the Oxbridge model but spared of the 21

Jill Pellew and Miles Taylor, eds., op. cit. p. 226.

22

Nicholas Abercrombie, Ian Cullen and others, op. cit. (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 12.

23

Ibid. p. 17.

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model of the University of Essex campus demonstrating the conception of the university as an academic enclave in an open field, insulated from the town by a circumambient landscape condition

19

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

Research Thesis

concomitant exclusivity. As indicated in the introduction, the colleges are ‘imagined communities’ within the university which, whilst facilitating the self-realisation of the individual within the mass society of the university also lapsed back to hierarchical patterns of human association.24 The dichotomy of conservatism versus novelty played out amongst the New Universities according to the ideological beliefs of their founders; where York opted for colleges, Essex opted for high-rises. In opposition to the traditional academic community of the college, more radical architectural and residential propositions emerged at UEA and Essex. At the former, students would be accommodated within terraced ‘ziggurats’ of student rooms serried to form ranks of bastion-like formations, at the latter, students would be housed in high-rise towers in the parkland with expansive views over the university and town beyond.

Fig. 30, 31

In contrast to the paternalistic collegiate model, these novel forms of residence gave agency to the students; in the towers of Essex students were expected to learn about communitarian living as if living in a city tower, where the tower itself would be managed by residents.25 There was a humanistic belief that the emancipatory conditions of university life would provide the preconditions for the formation of a ‘new man’ through self-determination, nowhere more so than in a hall of residence.26 Within the critical mass of students at the university, each individual would be able to affiliate themselves to a micro-community within the spatial limits of a local housing unit. At a macro scale, for each of the New Universities diverse views on residential organisation would be symbolic of the ethos of the university as a whole. Whether a modern or traditional conception of the institution, the common criteria of the New Universities was that they were believed to be in some way utopianist in their espousal of communitarian modes of living.

20

24

Jill Pellew and Miles Taylor, eds., op. cit. p. 88.

25

Jack O’Connor, ‘A Janus-Faced Approach to the New Universities of the 1960s: Monumentality and Pedagogy at Sussex and Essex’, in Postwar Architecture Between Italy and the UK: Exchanges and Transcultural Influences, ed. By Lorenzo Ciccarelli and Clare Melhuish (London: UCL Press, 2021), pp. 192-194.

26

Jules Lubbock, ‘University of Essex: Vision & Reality’ (University of Essex: 2014), p. 15.

above left

typology comparisons between the ‘metropolitan’ residential mode at Essex (towers) and the ‘staircase’ residential mode at UEA (ziggurats) Fig. 32

above

UEA - each residential staircase (marked by a projecting porch) is accessed from a ‘street in the sky’, or elevated walkway, behind each ziggurat

1 The University Campus as a Comprehensive Project

Research Thesis

On the basis of the separation on a ‘comprehensive’ site, coupled with residence on campus, the idea of the New University campuses as small cities emerges, whereby all student needs are accommodated intramurally in the Five-Minute University. The University of Essex was masterplanned according to this principle, where the consolidated form of the campus placed all functions within a five minute walking radius of the centre. To an extent, the self-sufficiency inherent in this isolation from the host town by limiting the flow of people and information on a concentrated campus renders the New University campus politically absolute. That is, they are physically segregated, academic enclaves. For the Vice Chancellor of Essex, Albert Sloman, there was a danger the development of the individual could be inhibited by a ‘cloistered and introverted’ environment, where the student would have no reason to leave the campus limits.27

Fig. 33

On site residence was designed to resist the nine-to-five commuter university and elicit a holistic experience of the university through the hybridity of living and learning in a shared environment. Yet the synthesis of work and leisure in a microcosm of the city superimposed the spatial and temporal aspects of university life within the coterminous domain of the campus, where human activity would be orchestrated by a temporal logic and a corresponding spatial concept, specifically the Five Minute University. At Essex, the pedestrian street and series of interconnected squares of the campus was designed to be used by day and night as a backdrop for a daily performance of constant activity; encapsulated in the architect’s vision for lights at ‘midnight streaming across the squares’, effectively supplanting the host city as a venue for student enrichment.28 The campus was envisioned to provide all the services necessary for the student, without recourse to travel outside its limits, collapsing both space and time into a total environment. Not only is this urban logic of the campus didactic, in instilling self-determinism, but it is conversely an environment of behavioural control. The concentration of all the functions of the institution into a ‘university town’, quite apart from the real host town, established the campus as an autonomous island of dislocated urbanity in the country.

this page

rendering of the pedestrian environment at Essex - in the absence of dedicated social amenities, the squares provide a setting for university life

Whether the implications of self-sufficiency are positive or negative, the campus can be therefore conceived as the manifestation of a prototype city - a miniature urban condition in the country with its own spatial order and temporal routine. The whole programme of the New Universities engages themes of the idyllic concept of Urbs in Rure, insofar as the transplantation of an urban condition to a rural condition creates an autonomous microcosm of the city in the country.29 The potential for a political relationship between the institution of the New Universities and their host towns is limited by their physical separation; where the absence of a common ground inhibits transaction between town and gown and the architectural interface of the campus and the city. These tensions, of modern versus traditional, of liberal versus paternalistic, of campus versus city, defined the reception of the New Universities which, in spite of radical rhetoric, were regarded as conflicted ‘state experiments’ or conservative establishments beneath modern appearances.

27

Albert Sloman, ‘A University in the Making - A University Town’, in The Listener (1963), p. 981.

28

Jack O’Connor, op. cit. (London: UCL Press, 2021), p. 192.

29

‘Urbs in Rure’ translates to town in the country, (metaphorically, the urban in the rural) attributed to Herbert J. Gans

21

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

Research Thesis

1.2 The Urban Theory of the New University Campus Following the political conception of the New University campuses, that is, how the campus as a whole relates - or else is separated from - the extramural condition of the city through its own urbanity; this section uses case studies of the aforementioned campuses to establish a general urban theory of the postwar campus. Herein the design philosophy of the campus and the organisation of the university are brought together with respect to their interdependency; where the objective of the university design is to embody the university ideology, and to shape that ideology thereafter. Assuming the hypothetical definition of the campus as a cohesive environment spanning the scales of architecture and urbanism under a conceptual framework, this section tests the stated hypothesis through built case studies of the campus.

Furthermore, beyond architectural considerations, the capacity for the campus to be representational is examined and therefore the descriptions alternate between the physical appraisal of architecture and the symbolic purposes served.

In each case study, the physical structuring of the campus reflects the philosophy of university leaders, such as the founding Vice Chancellor, the views of their architect, and prevailing planning theories, notably the townscape movement.30 No building programme of this sort had ever been attempted by the state before, and the concept of a greenfield university campus had no modern precedents in England, opposing the incremental patterns of both Redbrick and Oxbridge type universities in urban environments. Considerable licence for experimentation with architectural ideas was therefore accorded to the designers of the New Universities. Architects held the power to organise

22

30

Gordon Cullen, The Concise Townscape (Abingdon: Routledge, 1961): Jack O’Connor, op. cit.

(London: UCL Press, 2021), p. 182.

Fig. 34

this page

a new english picturesque at UEA - the campus in the country confronted the rural condition through the transplantation of a condition of urbanity

1 The University Campus as a Comprehensive Project

Research Thesis

the lives and routine of the academic community through the built environment, which in turn prefigured the image and essential ideological ethos of the nascent university. It is through comprehensive planning and ideological consensus that architects achieved unparalleled authority under the aegis of university leaders in the experimental field of campus design, even overriding educationalists themselves.31 This period, in particular in the field of university design, represented the height of the status of the architect as master-builders and designers of sociological conditions, employing modernist architecture as a mass medium.32 The condition that architects sought to transplant to the landscape setting of the New Universities was a sense of urbanity, which could heighten the already cosmopolitan condition of the university. From the pastoral groupings of the University of York; whose centripetal pattern of a constellation of colleges arranged along a lake centred on a congregational hall and lakeside square, to the megastructures of the University of Essex and UEA; whose repeated ranks of living and teaching units subordinated the landscape, each of the universities obeyed an overarching design concept, or system, which informed a cohesive architectural form and prescribed future development patterns.

The urbanity of the New University campus is based on a megastructural principle which assimilates individual buildings into an integrated physical ensemble. Therefore the campus hypothesis can be extended to state that it is predominantly a conceptual and deterministic model, where the parts and the whole are reciprocally conceived in relation to a continuous spatio-temporal project.

Fig. 35

above

within the UEA campus - groupings of buildings in a similar tectonic language create a unity from heterogenous parts Fig. 36

left

diagrams of New University campuses left collegiate clusters around a central nucleus at York right linear megastructure at Essex

Insofar as the urban theory of the campus relies on the correspondence of the scales of architecture (i.e. the individual building) to urbanism (i.e. the relationships between buildings), then the creation of a society of the university through a geometrical order establishes the campus as a ‘gestalt’ entity which represents more than the sum of its parts. Beyond the visible image of the campus, a mental image of an integral campus can be inferred from an incomplete picture of individual buildings. The campus as gestalt is captured by its imagined totality extrapolated from individual parts within the whole; for commentators on the New University campuses ‘the development of a university would give a sense of completeness from the earliest stage’.33 Hence, the formal repetition of a rule based architectural system allows the ideation of the university as an macro environment deduced from micro campus elements, fully apprehensible at any given place or stage; simultaneously prefiguring its future development.

Therefore, this principle of premeditated expansion is a prime determinant in the conception of the campus. The campus as a whole assumes the structure of a scaffold which, in its extant form accommodates event and programme and establishes a preconceived formal rule. In the case of York, UEA, and Essex, each campus comprises a cohesive urban structure realised from recurrent tectonic elements, enabling the modular repetition of an existing 31

Stefan Muthesius, op. cit. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 90.

32

Neo-Avant-Garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond ed. by Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, Studies in British Art, 21 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 11-12.

33

Tony Birks, Building the New Universities (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972), p. 18.

23

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

Research Thesis

framework at a different point in space and a later point in time. Planning for future expansion would allow the New Universities to bypass the ad hocism of earlier campus models; the latter characterised by an incoherent estate of varied architectural styles. This was a possibility fulfilled by the form of the matbuilding and megastructure and exemplified by the campuses of Essex and UEA. Megastructures incorporate the heterogeneous units of the university into a total urban structure, a framework which would realise itself over time though the addition of further phases. It was ‘fundamental to megastructures that different parts of a building have a different life cycle’.34 Crucially, the reconfigurability and tolerance to change allowed the megastructural campus to play a part in the metabolism of the university as an evolving project. At an architectural level, a repeated structural module imposed a framework for expansion and internal reconfiguration, whilst at a strategic level, the serial logic of the campus would indicate areas for future development. For instance, at UEA, further expansion in student numbers could be uniformly accommodated by extending the ranges of ziggurats using an identical formal order.

24

The concept of the megastructure established a rule based system for the urban layout of the campus, where programmatic singularity precluded its systematic incorporation into the megastructure, the programme would be expressed as an exception to the rule. Campus logic integrates distinct programmes and simultaneously expresses their unique identity. This is true of the campus at Essex, where exceptional forms such as the library and lecture block are separated from the fabric of the mat-building as freestanding objects in space; individuated from the systems-building form of the megastructure and designed according to their inherent spatial parameters. This ‘structuralist’ design philosophy magnifies architecture to the scale of urbanism and is theorised herein as the arrangement of figures within the frame. The figure is the autonomous architectural object (i.e. the exception), whilst the frame (i.e.

34

Henk Engel, ‘Autonomous Architecture and the Project of the City’, OASE, 62 (2003), p. 42.

Fig. 37

above left

accommodating expansion through a predetermined formal inventory of parts. at UEA, expansion to teaching units is accommodated by the extension of the teaching wall along its axis. expansion in student numbers is accommodated through the addition of further ziggurats Fig. 38

above

comparative elevations on an individual tectonic module at Essex and UEA - in either case dependent on the repetition of architectural elements

1 The University Campus as a Comprehensive Project

Research Thesis

the rule) is the integrative urban fabric. The frame makes the virtual space of the void into a positive form itself through the disposition and delineation of a spatial envelope. A third element of a field is generated, which represents the enclosed interstitial space in which both figure and frame are perceived together. For Alison Smithson, the form of the mat-building (such as Essex) presented a continuous frame of programmatic cells capable of unlocking ‘new freedoms of action’ for the individual in ‘closeknit patterns of association’ with members of the academic community upon a common field.35 By giving form to the spatial field, the frame supports the life of the university by containment and intensification. Inherent in this principle was the question of how a singular building could become a campus with a sense of urbanity. For the structuralists this was part of the objective to ‘restore the complexity and versatility of urban life’ through the integration and simultaneous expression of all functions.36 At each campus a tectonic module is employed as a structural grid to regulate the spatial field. At Essex, the continuous matbuilding is formed from a repetitive trabeated structure which takes on a varied appearance through the primary colours of the spandrels and the irregular mullion arrangement to create Corbusian Ondulatoires. At UEA, the teaching spine is set out according to a uniform facade module corresponding to the structural system, whilst the truncated ends of the ziggurat clusters anticipate future expansion.

Both the megastructural campuses dominate the landscape through a recursive tectonic framework, likened by the Smithsons to ‘machine[s] in a garden’.37 At York, the campus cannot be accurately described as a megastructure, being so fragmented at collegiate nodes within the landscape, yet it retains traces of structuralist thought in its layout and physical form. The use of CLASP modular panels to achieve a cohesive appearance to each college within the University of York, despite their dispersal in the overall scheme, allows each college to be understood as a fragment of a unitary campus.38 Common to all three campuses, whether a megastructure, mat-building, or constellation, is a conceptual plan which mediated the relationships between parts to whole, enabling consistency across space and time. Each campus framework was based on the idea that a tectonic syntax could order the facade, the block, and the campus. This was, in part, an architectural effect, derived from the qualities of campus buildings and the economy of scale in the use of a building system.

However, the conception of the ground - or in some cases elevated - plane for pedestrian movement was equally as pivotal in the urban theory of the campus than a tectonic logic alone.

Fig. 39

left

structural ordering of the campus in a hierarchy of frame, field and figure, demonstrated using the inventory of tectonic elements at Essex Fig. 40

below

the elevated ‘ground’ for pedestrian circulation consists of a series of raised squares and covered colonnades at Essex

The manipulation of the ground field in each campus registers the elevated status of the pedestrian in postwar modernism. Comprehensive planning of the campus which exploited topography enabled the creation of a continuous complex of pedways, platforms, pathways and plazas to 35

Debora Domingo Calabuig, Raul Castellanos Gomez and Ana Abalos Ramos, ‘The Strategies of Mat-Building’ in Architectural Review, 1398 (2013), p.88.

36

Henk Engel, op. cit., p. 32.

37

Alison and Peter Smithson, The Space Between (Cologne: Verlag Der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017), p. 168.

38

CLASP panels were a prefabricated construction technique in the primary and secondary education sector, their use at York gave the campus of colleges a monolithic character.

25

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

Research Thesis

coordinate pedestrian flows of movement and assembly through a spatial field. These physical connections gave form to a system of spatial ordering which orchestrated pedestrian movement with both a technical and theatrical dimension. On the one hand, the hierarchical and three-dimensional planning of the campus was axiomatic of postwar urban planning in general, which relegated vehicular infrastructure literally beneath the pedestrian.39 In the case of UEA and Essex, vehicular servicing is from a concealed undercroft in the bowl of a valley, whilst pedestrians are elevated on networks of platforms overhead.

On the other hand, a theatrical dimension was implied through reference to ancient forms. At the same campuses, conscious emulation of spaces from antiquity such as the forum, amphitheatre and agora framed urban drama in a series of campus scenes.

Pedestrian movement on campus was thus considered in functional and ritual terms - as practical infrastructure as much as an arena for university life. The principle of edification is engaged in the manipulation of the ground as ‘the most essential datum of existence’ in this dualistic conception of architecture and urban design which serves higher ideals alongside functionalist infrastructural concerns.40 Therefore, it is by monumentalising spaces of procession and assembly which imparts a sense of permanence to the quotidian routine of the academic community, invoking the Arendtian concept of the ‘space of appearance’ - that is, a space of communal and selfrealisation.41 Contrary to the meaning of a utopia as a non-place, campus spaces were designed to construct a collective consciousness by heightening the experience of a common field, reflecting the utopianism of campus planners in the design of the campus as an ideal city.

The concept of the ground is quite literally elevated in the aerial networks of streets in the sky and platforms on pilotis which privilege the position of the pedestrian in relation to the landscape. At Essex and UEA, a picturesque landscape of valleys and broads is supplanted by the artificial creation of a man-made landscape, itself clearly circumscribed in extent and form to elicit an apprehensible limit to the campus. Here, the threshold between artificial and natural is sharply defined. Conversely, at York the network of pathways and bridges at grade splice together satellite structures distributed around the lake, here, the campus is primarily understood as a necklace of routes which define the campus as an infrastructure, punctuated by localised college clusters. In each case the counterposition of a finite architectural form and an amorphous landscape condition emphasises the limits of the campus as an academic sanctuary in the English landscape. Insulated from the suburban condition

26

39

Tony Birks, op. cit., pp. 73-74.

40

Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara, ‘Platforms: Architecture and the Use of the Ground’, Conditions (2019) <https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/conditions/287876/platformsarchitecture-and-the-use-of-the-ground/> [accessed 8 November 2020]

41

Patchen Markell, ‘Political Tectonics’, OASE, 106 (2020), pp. 41-42.

Fig. 41 - 43

above

the separation of the pedestrian from the vehicle was the sine qua non of postwar planning - illustrated at UEA by the elevation of the pedestrian on raised platforms (left) and pedways (centre, right)

1 The University Campus as a Comprehensive Project

Research Thesis

which today encroaches on these campuses, the picturesque relationship to the wider university estate invokes the etymological origin of the campus in a field found in early campus archetypes. Separated thus, the New University campus as an ideal enclave renders it politically absolute, deriving part of its identity from the nearby town, but otherwise architecturally unencumbered by its extraneous urban forces.

To return to the hypothesis of the campus, we can understand that the campus is at least a representation of a miniature city, if not a reification of a unique urban condition. The campus attains a sense of urbanity through its microcosmic condition. However, the means by which campus planners sought to symbolise the society of the university were varied, some by megastructure in the unitary system, others by dispersal and clustering in the collegiate system. In either case, the architecture of the campus symbolised the ideology of the university as a whole, incorporating both physical and incorporeal units into a singular gestalt and polity, observing its own concept of space and time. The urban theory of the New University campus heightens the experience of movement and assembly through the manipulation of levels and pathways, serving a higher purpose of reconciling the individual student with their academic community in a microcosm of the city. Simulatenously, the architecture of the campus provides a regulatory ordering as a frame for university life, whose formal consistency is counterposed by exceptional buildings which confirm the rule. Having established a general theory of the campus as a conceptual ideal and a physical environment, the focus of this thesis now segues from the utopianist campus as an unrestricted ideal city in the country - urbs in rure - to the political situation of the campus in the city - rus in urbe.

Fig. 44

above

figure and frame diagram of the Essex campus, intersected by the pedestrian spine following the curve of the valley Fig. 45

below

the campus at Essex is composed of a continuous mat-building, which frames an urban pattern of squares and courts. specific programmes which cannot be accommodated by the frame are expressed as exceptions

27

UEA —

Fig. 46

University of East Anglia

right

view of the amphitheatre at the nucleus of the UEA campus - the centripetal form of the bowl concentrates activity and therefore forms a natural assembly point for the academic community Fig. 47

below

drawing of the amphitheatre - the frame of the teaching wall provides a backdrop to smaller architectural figures which provide an irregular townscape commensurate with an idea of urbanity

28

University of Essex

Fig. 48, 49

right

the campus exploits the topography of the valley to create a multi-level scheme left a terraced court once acted as an amphitheatre for performances, today it is a landscaped garden right an upper level square is framed by a uniform architectural envelope Fig. 50

below

beneath court and square, a service road is concealed in the bed of the valley - in order that pedestrians and vehicles are strictly segregated

Fig. 51

below

sectional drawing of the campus, the form of the mat-building neutralises topographical irregularities to create an architectural net over the site

29

University of York

Fig. 52

below

the relationship of buildings to landscape is modelled on the Cambridge ‘Backs’, whereby college buildings can be seen through a screen of trees and across the water

Fig. 53

above

each college has a particular relationship to the landscape in spite of their uniform architectural expression due to the CLASP panel system - the use of which gives cohesion to distinct parts of the campus Fig. 54

left

drawing of the college - which internalises the landscape within a court delineated by a continuous covered colonnade. the covered colonnade intersects the whole college and extends throughout the campus proper

30

Chapter Two Urban Interiors The Microcosm within the City

Fig. 55

this page

a city within a city - rendering by Peter Sainsbury for Cruickshank and Seward of proposals for the MEP student quarter, positing a new urban order in the postindustrial city

31

Manchester Education Precinct

University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology

LOCATION Manchester, UK DISTANCE TO CENTRE < 1 mile ACREAGE 280 acres PLANNING TYPE megastructure/ masterplan UNIVERSITY TYPE unitary RESIDENCE TYPE halls of residence in linear blocks ARCHITECT Wilson and Womersley COMMENCEMENT DATE 1964 - partially realised

LOCATION Manchester, UK DISTANCE TO CENTRE < 1 mile ACREAGE 26 acres PLANNING TYPE landscaped precinct UNIVERSITY TYPE unitary - affiliated with VUM RESIDENCE TYPE co-living apartments in towers ARCHITECT Cruickshank and Seward et al.

COMMENCEMENT DATE 1960

Fig.56, 57

32

this column

top view of the MEP model whose scale exceeds even the New University estates below original proposal excluding UMIST, FE Colleges, & university hospital

Fig. 58, 59

this column

top view of a quadrangle at UMIST showing the tower and podium configuration of campus buildings below UMIST main site - 1967 MEP plan

Aula

LOCATION SITE SURFACE AREA PLANNING TYPE TYPOLOGY SECTOR PURPOSE

Fig. 60, 61

Manchester, UK UMIST Campus 2200m2 footprint - 0.5 acres infill building social condenser / public union cultural + civic anchor project initiating campus renewal programme

this column

top view of the Aula and proposed public realm within the UMIST Campus below plan of the Aula to scale with other plans on facing page

Chapter Two

Case Studies

As established, the general theory of the campus and its formal analysis takes the rural New University as exemplary case studies, unencumbered by constraints such as city planning, fragmented land assembly and contingencies present in urban situations, and therefore planners were able to devise an ideal city in the form of the campus. The campus in the country embodies traditional concepts of higher education ensconced in an academic enclave of its own design. This chapter examines the conception of the campus in the city through two contemporaneous postwar projects in Manchester, as a city which since modernisation and the decline of industry has been forged by the Knowledge Economy.42 In this examination, the direct counterposition of a campus to an extramural urban fabric is contrasted with the New University campus to determine how the postwar idealistic campus type interfaces with the postindustrial city, both of which adhere to an order of their own. On the level of architectural form alone, immediate conflict arises between the form of the campus and the city, which are open to one another, but also confront each other. In this respect the heterotopian description of the campus in the city as an ‘other place’ eclipses the utopian description of the campus in the country. As this thesis maintains, the campus is conceived as a small city with its own political organisation, thus the urban campus is understood as a city-in-a-city, or a nested urban interior, as is explained hence.

42

Martin Dodge and Richard Brook, ‘From Manufacturing Industries to a Services Economy: The Emergence of a ‘New Manchester’ in the Nineteen Sixties, in Making Post-War Manchester: Visions of an Unmade City (2016), p. 14.

33

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

Research Thesis

2 — Urban Interiors The Microcosm within the City

2.1 Rus in Urbe

VUM UMIST MEP

EIC

34

The Garden in the Machine

Preceding the development of the New Universities arising from the UGC decision in favour of peripheral sites, planning for urban renewal through the vehicle of the Knowledge Economy was underway in Manchester, seat of the prototypal ‘Civic’ university; the Victoria University of Manchester and its affiliated university; the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. The two universities considered in this chapter are distinct types of institution, however, they are nevertheless physically and politically related through the protracted Manchester Educational Precinct plan, which encompassed the combined universities estate and ‘represent[ed] one of the great challenges of urban development’ of the postwar period in Europe.43 By the postwar period the Victoria University was barely 100 years old, yet it formed the first of the civic type of university, initially founded by industrialists in urban centres with the objective of providing evening classes and only later upgraded to university status. UMIST and its predecessor institutions predate VUM yet ultimately became an altogether different type of university, specialising in science and technology as an urban technopole; a science city with unique architectural implications. Clustered with other sites of technology under the Precinct plan, UMIST qua urban university became a physical expression of the Education-Industrial Complex; a relationship facilitated by the presence of a university campus in an industrial city.44 43

Hugh Wilson and Lewis Womersley, Manchester Education Precinct: The Final Report of the Planning Consultants 1967 (Manchester: Corporation of Manchester, 1967), p. 8.

44

See Richard Brook, ‘The National Computing Centre: “White Heat”, Modernization and Postwar Manchester’, in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 70:4 (University of California Press, 2020)

Fig. 62

this page

view towards the main quadrangle at the UMIST Campus; one sub-precinct of the larger MEP plan

2 Urban Interiors — The Microcosm within the City

Research Thesis

From an ideological position and in terms of a physical relationship, the campus in the city is simultaneously a negation and an affirmation of the urban condition. Ideologically, postwar discourse concerning the merits of urban institutions is equivocal with arguments both in favour for urban institutions such as VUM and UMIST, and those in favour of zoned university campuses in the ‘conservative’ model of the New Universities.45 It was still believed by many that the city posed a challenge to a integrated academic community which would be fragmented and alienated by off-site residence in the nineto-five university. Alternatively, in its physical structure, the campus in the city provided an intermediate scale for the individual to assimilate to mass society by emulating its organisation and physical characteristics, and thus offering more favourable conditions for social cohesion. Therefore, the urban campus became a harbour for the sociological integration of the individual to a mass society beyond the university community. For architects, the problems of society found in the city could be targeted and subjected to experimentation through the form of the campus. Campuses face many of the same functional problems as cities on a more apprehensible scale; such as governance and citizenship, transit, security, welfare, housing, zoning, expansion, etc. Urban university campuses became prototype cities through which postwar planning and urban renewal found new agency in a compressed form, positing the possibility of a heightened urban experience and a revised democratic relationship between town and gown.

The analogous forms of city and campus served as proxies of each other in the minds of architects: offering a physical site where the interplay of town and gown could become a cosmopolitan space of appearance. This transactional reciprocity between the activities of students and citizens became intertwined in this radical mode of planning, unlocking the democratic potentiality of spaces of edification. In Manchester, this common frame for university and city affairs found its physical incarnation in the MEP plan. Near-equivalent in scale to the city centre itself, the Precinct plan envisioned the comprehensive development of the consolidated university and further education estates into a large scale urban agglomeration whose sheer size alone confronts the city.

The MEP encompasses a sector radiating out from the city centre along the linear axis of the Oxford Road, along which an ‘environmental area’ for exclusive pedestrian use would establish an inner city campus concourse for exchange between the academic community and the public equally.46 Adopting many of the urban design elements of the campus theory; the Precinct transposed the utopianist architecture of the New Universities into an urban domain.

Under the plan, an integrated urban environment is comprehensively planned employing pedestrian platforms and an elevated deck system, landscaped courts create a new setting for exceptional buildings, and a megastructural frame provides an continuous armature for communitarian housing projects.47 Where the New Universities used megastructures and mat45

Nicholas Abercrombie, Ian Cullen and others, op. cit. (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 19-41.

46

Colin Buchanan,Traffic in Towns: A Study of the Long Term Problems of Traffic in Urban Areas (HMSO, 1963)

47

Hugh Wilson and Lewis Womersley, Manchester Education Precinct: Interim Report (Manchester: Corporation of Manchester, 1964)

Fig. 63-65

this page

townscape inspired views of the Education Precinct the proposal envisions a split-level ‘environmental area’ for public and university use. vehicular traffic is relegated below a car free public realm of squares and parks

35

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

Research Thesis

buildings to establish a new order and metabolism to the university, the MEP plan proposed using megastructures to plan a mat-city, and consequently, restructure the metabolism of Manchester city centre as a whole. The Precinct, it was believed, would reorient urban functions to a new cultural and educational quarter, expanding the joint universities’ institutional remit to encompass a wider sphere of public life. In opposition to the New Universities, the urban conditions of the MEP plan provided a common ground for the shared interests of the university and the city - amalgamating both into a prototype for a univercity.

The Precinct plan proposed a near-total redevelopment of a city quarter through the implementation of a campus concept in an urban environment. In architectural terms, the concept of a precinct can be likened to the campus, the difference resides in the condition which surrounds it. In the case of the MEP, an urban situation warrants the description precinct, rather than campus. When transposed thus, the definition of a campus becomes relevant once again, in the introduction of ideals which in themselves are foreign to the industrial city and instead connote landscape, sanctuary, and community. To invert the description of a rural university as a machine in a garden, the introduction of a campus into a city subverts the space of production of the industrial city to an environmental area designed around public spaces of appearance: evoking a garden in the machine. Urban campus planners reintroduced landscape theory and pre-modern notions of Englishness to the city through the Townscape movement, which privileged pedestrian movement, visual scenography, and a varied experience of space exemplified by the precinct type.48

PRECINCT

CITY

Fig. 66

Although the principles were traditional, precinct planning collided with the most modern of spatial phenomena, positing a new form of urban space which nevertheless held as its basis familiar architectural arrangements.

Repeatedly in the design of the New Universities and urban university precincts, planners retroactively appropriated the sensitivity of traditional townscapes and combined that traditional experience of urbanity with a monumental structuralist reordering through urban form. As a form which concentrates activity, the precinct at the scale of a city centre must be partitioned into subprecincts or else diffuse their inherent urbanity.49 Within the MEP plan local clusters create centres within an integrated plan. A key factor in precinctualplanning as much as campus-planning is the arrangement of buildings in such a way as to concentrate activity and generate a sense of urbanity. The hypothesis of the campus in the city is therefore conditioned in an extramural urban environment to evolve into the precinct model, whereby the confrontation of the campus and the city allows the campus to serve as a political prototype that is a model of a polis - for the city itself.

36

48

Otto Saumarez Smith, op. cit. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 16-26.

49

Frederick Gibberd, Town Design, 3rd edn. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959), p. 57.

this page

diagrammatic figure/ground inversion the Precinct inverts the spatiality of the industrial city by creating interconnected structures favouring courts and internal streets rather than independent city blocks. the MEP plan explicitly references the courts of the Cambridge college as an exemplar to emulate spatially

2 Urban Interiors — The Microcosm within the City

Fig. 67, 68

Research Thesis

this page and overleaf

The precinct as an experiment in urban planning - the campus extension at the inner-city University of Leeds offers an alternative spatial order to the city; privileging pedestrian movement, landscaped courts, and a continuous traffic free ‘environmental area’

37

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

Research Thesis

2.2 The Spatiality of the Urban Campus Fig. 69

CDA

38

Within the Educational Precinct, sub-precincts were proposed to concentrate activity at nodal points within the plan. The UMIST Campus sub-precinct was already underway at the time of the Precinct’s formation and so became integrated as a pilot project, establishing a formal precedent for the MEP plan. As a Comprehensive Development Area on a tabula rasa site, the design of the campus in the city offered the possibility to experiment with a new urban order and architectural form in a modernist idiom. CDA authority permitted the strategic restructuring of vast urban areas to be ‘conceived in their totality’, offering up urban sites conducive to the UGC’s guidelines.50 The Precinct itself accounted for 280 acres of land in the city (well in excess of the UGC requirement for the New Universities), of which the UMIST Campus site formed a small but strategically situated cell at around one tenth of that acreage. The Precinct as a whole offered the ability to fundamentally reconceptualise the space of the university; in its spatial synthesis with other cultural and educational institutions, but also by virtue of its sheer scale alone.

50

Martin Dodge and Richard Brook, op. cit. (2016), pp. 29-30.

top

The courts at the UMIST Campus, Manchester - the intensive development of the campus generates a sense of urbanity and simultaneous gentility through a pedestrian realm of landscaped courts in the city

2 Urban Interiors — The Microcosm within the City

Research Thesis

The location and finite boundary of the Precinct in the city encloses what Stan Allen describes as a ‘directed field condition’ which could challenge the composition of the industrial city as a critical project. For a directed field condition, a strategic plan accommodates ‘tactical improvisations of future users’ and a ‘loose fit is proposed between activity and enclosing envelope’.51 According to Allen, ‘field configurations are loosely bound aggregates characterised by porosity and local interconnectivity’ where reciprocal relations, lines, are primary; and individual figures, points, are secondary.

The implications of field theory manifest themselves in the form of a campus, quite literally in name, but moreover in the interdependency of individual cells within the whole entity. Whether that consists of an intangible unit, such as a university department, or a physical unit, such as an individual building, the field condition establishes a common datum for a critical urban project.

The field establishes its own spatial ordering based on the organisational logic of the university, yet also incorporates the utopianist space inherent in postwar campus-planning. For both the Precinct and the UMIST Campus, an open configuration of buildings creates a porous public realm to infiltrate the space of the urban university campus from the space of the city. Landscaped courts and squares set-out a shared spatial field for multiple institutions to interface with the public life of the city - spaces where activity and enclosing envelope reciprocate to heighten collective experience. The thresholds between campus and city are open yet apparent enough to establish the sub-precincts of the MEP as a series of urban interiors. Assuming the megastructure of the Precinct can be considered as a singular mat-building, then each cluster, or ‘aggregate’, circumscribes a series of public rooms from the void of the field. Local interconnectivity and pedestrian flow between the city and campus is orchestrated by a continuous network of elevated pedways over traffic, which performs as processional routes from the city in addition to their basic infrastructural purpose. These elevated ‘lines’ in the field condition act as synaptic links in the complex system of the campus interwoven in the city. A directed field condition permits the institutional space of the university to become elevated into a civic space of edification and serve as a counter-site to the spatiality of the city.

Fig. 70

above

figure and frame comparisons at Essex (top) and UMIST (below) - at Essex, figures are enclosed in the framework of the matbuilding precluding interconnectivity. At UMIST, figures surmount the frame and therefore interrelationships between figures (i.e. points) are more salient Fig. 71

left

figure and frame relationships at UMIST - a horizontal datum separates the frame, (i.e. podia enclosing courts) at ground level from the figure (i.e. towers as monuments) at an aerial level

The UMIST Campus is a prime candidate to indicate the political relationship between campus and the city, whereby the idealised conditions of the former serve as a critique of the established order of the latter. The ability to conceive of the campus as a totality produced in the UMIST Campus an essay of modernist design - a prototype for campus design, and by extension, city design. Within an urban setting, the field condition of the UMIST Campus arranges a chequerboard sequence of landscaped courts within a pedestrian precinct, which double-up as the setting of monumental architectural forms.

The campus field is arranged on the horizontal and vertical axis to create a 51

Stan Allen, Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City, 1st edn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), p. 102.

39

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

Research Thesis

three dimensional compositional field. At lower level, a consistent datum is established of podia which collectively enclose the space of the field at the level of the pedestrian. This spatial frame is surmounted by the architectural figures of the towers, which are formally individuated and occupy a more rarefied spatial field. This sectional separation allows each figure to be viewed in isolation above the datum of the podium, whilst simultaneously closely delineating the space of the courts at the ground plane. On the space of the field giving rise to the experience of a figure, Leatherbarrow simply states that ‘a setting in which there is viewing distance on all four sides is the site of a monument’.52 As such, the tower on podium type enables both a monumental figuration of solid form above the podium datum, in addition to a relational framing of the space between at podium level, lending form to the void itself. By way of enclosure, the space of each court and their contiguous spatial arrangement creates an experiential sequence of landscaped areas orchestrated by the figure-ground layout of the pedestrian precinct. The chequerboard figure-ground plan heightens the spatio-temporal dimension through a sequence of expansion and contraction as experienced by the pedestrian in motion. As an interconnected form, the precinct inverts the megastructural logic of New University campuses with an infrastructural logic, which is about the open spaces between buildings rather than the open-endedness of architectural form.

At its most abstract level, the campus which incorporates landscape and respects its finite relationship to the city conceptually resembles the utopianistic notion of the urban walled garden, whereby the condition of rus in urbe - of landscape in the city - counteracts the spatial and conceptual idea of the industrial city. Furthermore, the absence of vehicles within the courts of the campus, and the planning-out of anything which might resemble a traditional city street creates a conspicuously heterotopian sense of an ‘other place’.

Nevertheless, the campus is - as defined by this thesis - a city in its own right.

What is proposed by this actualised ideal city in an conflicting urban condition is the idea of a heterotopia, capable of reflecting the organisation of the city as an idea, yet negating the industrial city by providing an alternative city of courts and open public spaces. What the campus of the urban university offers most of all in its physical reality is the possibility of an ‘other city’, capable of posing a critical reflection of the city in which it is situated: an urban heterotopia. For Foucault, the heterotopia is a place capable of ‘creating another space, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is disorderly’, a criterion satisfied by the directed field configuration of the urban campus, which offers an architectural and conceptual re-ordering of the city as a counter-site.53

40

52

David Leatherbarrow, Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology, and Topography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 79.

53

Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, Architecture/Mouvement/ Continuité, October 1984, p. 21.

Fig. 72, 73

this page

The enclosed spatial frame - as delineated by the lower podia blocks - create defined squares and courts and compressive moments between open spaces

2 Urban Interiors — The Microcosm within the City

Research Thesis

This ability, for the form of a campus as a microcosm to at once affirm and contradict the form of the city, is a possibility posited by the urban university campus. The campus of the New University studied in the first chapter forfeit their political relationship with the city by physical distancing, and therefore cannot be considered a critical project. Their withdrawal from the city returned them to ancient archetypes of Oxbridge collegiate models. In opposition, the utopianism of the urban campus posits the possibility of urban renewal and reform through the humanistic spatiality of the precinct, where the domain of the campus becomes the extended space of appearance of the city. What the Precinct manifests most clearly, is a project whereby the university as an autonomous polity can become integrated into an urban environment and offer an alternative spatial order to the city itself.

Fig. 74

this page

the campus and the city - collage of the UMIST Campus seen at its threshold to its urban environs: eliciting a heterotopian condition and political relationship to the space which it confronts note a version of this figure appears in a previous essay by the author entitled: Transforming the Campus: Contested Heritage Narratives and the Critical ReInterpretation of the Modernist Built Environment

41

UMIST —

University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology

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

Fig. 75

above left

tower and podium typology - the architecture of the campus operates on a dual scale: on the campus interior as contained at ground level of the courts, and on the campus exterior as seen on the city skyline Fig. 76

above right

the podium encloses the space of the court as a frame, surmounted by the monumental architectural figure

Fig. 77

full spread

the architecture of the UMIST Campus as a recognisable ensemble of buildings combining figure and frame through the tower and podium type A B C D E F

renold building barnes wallis pariser building staff house faraday building MSS tower

42

1962 1966 1963 1960 1967 1968

77a

77b

Research Thesis

77c

Research Thesis

77d

77e

77f

Fig. 78

above right

gardens in the machine - the campus environment consists of a continuous pedestrian realm of landscaped courts and squares, as an antidote to the dominant postindustrial city street Fig. 79

right

the visibility of vertical elements were consciously designed to act as visual markers to the city and indicate the campus edge

43

aula —

project for an urban union

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

Fig. 80

Research Thesis

above

plan of the aula (black) within the UMIST Campus - greyed areas represent positively defined quadrangles and main public realm areas Fig. 81

below

view of the aula in relation to buildings into which it connects at first floor level. at ground floor level, newly framed quadrangles create a continuous public curtilage

44

Fig. 82

above

view to the aula concourse in relation to existing campus buildings - the project entails a unified public realm around the entire campus

2 Urban Interiors — The Microcosm within the City

Research Thesis

2.3 The Field as an Architectural Project Fig. 83

The primary question inherent to this thesis is whether the campus is analogous to the city. As a form which spans the scales of architecture and urbanism, the campus is an appropriate form to examine the telescoping of scales from the city to the campus and observe ensuing relational values.

This thesis questions whether this logic could be extended to examine the architectural implications of the field condition on the scale of a single building, therefore condensing a fundamentally urban character through the ranks from city, to campus, to building. By applying the inductive hypothesis of the campus thus far examined, this section intends to validate this theory through deductive architectural propositions for the repurposing of the UMIST Campus.

Here, inferences which have formed a general theory from multiple types of campus are assigned to a set of tenets which informed the planning and organisation of an architectural project within the campus. As the campus type deploys architectural form to generate a condition of urbanity, collectivism and integration this project speculates on whether this condition can be distilled further into the form of a building. The political condition of this project, entitled the Aula, is therefore a nested urban interior; a building designed as a campus, within a campus, in turn within a city, and therefore embodies the political situation explored by this thesis. The Aula investigates an implicit question of this thesis namely, if a campus can be analogous to a city, how then is a building like a city?

The ideological purpose of the Aula is to reprogramme the postuniversity campus from an institutional environment to an entirely public sphere, as a pilot project for a wider strategy to reinvent the campus. The project modifies the typology of the student union for a democratised audience, becoming a social condenser which offers cultural, civic and recreational programmes for the public at large, intending to dispel the institutional qualities of a conventional union. As a civic commons for a wider urban citizenry, the Aula is intended to heighten perceptions of the grouping of the individual and the collective, insofar as to emulate the sociological potentiality of the university campus. It is not necessarily intended to mimic morphological features of the city or campus, but to invoke the democratic and civic aspects of campus design in an urban interior. Within the interior, the Aula assembles a host of complementary and sometimes incompatible programmes with a generally cultural purpose. However, it is intended that the project is more than the sum of its parts that, through the interplay of heterogenous events and programmes, the urban union might emerge as a stage for public life. Mirroring the status of the campus as a stage for university life, the Aula becomes the space of appearance which invokes the principle of edification of this thesis.

above

aula as a public interior - the project is intended as a foyer to the campus amassing cultural, civic and recreational programmes into a singular ‘social condenser’

45

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

INTENSIFICATION

46

Research Thesis

Spaces acquire a sense of urbanity through intensification as manipulated by enclosing frames. For the New Universities, structuralist thought which compacted programmes into local proximity unlocked new associations and actions through the adjacency of common or conflicting interest. The Aula, as an arena for public life set against cultural and civic anchor programmes, attempts to internalise and therefore condense the functions which would normally be spread across a campus or city. This adjacency of functions is a programmatic operation with spatial implications.

In the Aula, key cultural programmes, such as the library, people’s hall, theatre, gallery, civic services et cetera are organised vertically in raised tower volumes called cabinets. Like nested interiors within a larger interior of the Aula hall, the cabinets are freestanding masses which isolate the programmes within, yet the separation does not segregate the distinct audiences of each programme, as none of these functions have dedicated antespaces, and as such borrow foyer space from the Aula hall. In terms of organisation, the vertical programmes of each cabinet make use of various horizontal platforms, concourses and the aula floor itself as communal congregational spaces.

The Aula hall complements the programme cabinets by serving as a mixing chamber for the separate events which occur in the spaces around it- which in turn charges the space with a polyvalence commensurate with the idea of publicness. The three dimensionality of this scheme, which encourages movement and interspersion of the public through the Aula, evokes the primacy of the pedestrian in campus theory, raised on elevated platforms which converge on great agoras and fora where the academic community could assemble. Moreover, the belief shared by campus planners and the Aula project is that intensity

can be generated from overlapping complementary and incompatible programmes on a common field, thereby encouraging intercourse between respective individuals and groups. The objective of intensification, in opposition to dispersal, is to assimilate individuals within the collective, in the case of both campus theory and the Aula.

For the latter, the urbanity of the campus is substituted for the interior urbanism of the Aula hall, which contains and amplifies the exchange between social groups as a democratic space of appearance.

Within a public interior as much as a campus, it is not enough to expect action to arise spontaneously without a form of stimulus. Localised pockets of space are created by the clustering of micro-programmes on the Aula floor.

These small events are housed in small buildings, named aedicules, which populate and give form to the space of the public hall by creating more intimate nuclei in the large volume of the hall. By giving form to the space between programmes through enclosure - by making the field a figure in itself - and imbuing that space with a propelling programme, space and event coincide to generate a sense of urbanity so significant to the field condition.

2 Urban Interiors — The Microcosm within the City

Fig. 84

Research Thesis

previous page

specific programmes are accommodated within cabinets raised above the programmatically indeterminate aula floor beneath Fig. 85

right

the aula floor consists of clusters of figures which concentrate activity, acting as a common foyer for the programmes contained in the cabinets Fig. 86

below

exploded view of a cabinet as towervessels for specific programmes raised over the aedicules

Fig. 87

above

view within the cabinet of the library organised vertically over three levels, the library is one specific programme whose containment in the cabinet is a nested interior

Fig. 88

above

view of a pocket of charged space on the aula floor - the floor is a large plane for public assembly and doubles as a foyer for the cabinets

47

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

FIELD CONDITION

48

Research Thesis

In architectural terms, the triad of Figure, Frame, Field which defined a regulatory system for the construction of the New University campuses can be translated to object, megastructure, infra-structure. This triad can be scaled outwards to the scale of the city and beyond, or scaled inwards into the form of a singular building, such as the Aula. Logically, the three conditions establish a framework of rules which are fixed, yet it is a system whose structural versatility is capable of accommodating difference. What this means for architecture, and specifically the Aula, is that a tectonic skeleton (the frame) sets out a regular and therefore potentially extendable armature to accommodate specific forms (the figure), which are both united through an interconnected spatial idea (the field).

This condition is a micro representation of campus theory, which achieves the same effect of individuation within a mass environment on an expanded scale.

More specifically, the frame in the Aula refers to the structural frame but also to the regular spatial enclosure defined by columniation and freestanding masses. The frame is more than a physical tectonic object, but a unifying system whose purpose is not only constructional, but also representational. Columns and beams serve a greater purpose than distributing loads, they define space in the arrangement of tectonic elements, giving significance to the interstice as a more intimate spatial pocket within a larger framework and thresholds between volumes. The figure provides an exception to this logic. If the frame is regular, skeletal and read as points on a plan, the figure is irregular, robust and read as a mass on plan. Figures such as the aedicules are objects within space, whereas the space itself is defined by the frame around it. The field is what unites the rule and the exception and has an incorporeal presence elaborated through the concerted definition of space by both the figure and the frame. A manifestation of the field in the Aula is reified by the cradles - platforms and staircases which vault across spaces following desire lines between

programmes. Where the frame is a point on the plan, and the figure is a mass, the field is the continuous infrastructure of lines which connect elements within a spatial matrix.

The organisational logic of this hierarchy is apparent for both the Aula and the campus, as a reproducible method for managing the scales of architecture and urbanism in a holistic framework. For the New Universities, the outward expansion of the campus and inward orientation of the community could be achieved architecturally through a system which enables order and differentiation simultaneously. The frame would act as a physical megastructural framework, while independent figures provide the irregularity which subverts that totalising logic and supports distinct programmatic events. The opposite charge of the frame and figure, where one tends towards uniformity whilst the other tends towards specificity is balanced by the field condition, which, in the case of the campuses is the modulated ground plane which integrates these elements.

2 Urban Interiors — The Microcosm within the City

Fig. 89

Research Thesis

previous page

the tectonic frame is used to form thresholds both within the aula and externally Fig. 90

right

the cradles give circulation around the aula a visible performative aspect by isolating the platforms from the frame Fig. 91

below

infrastructural elements are structurally separated platforms and stairs suspended in space connecting primary programmes

Fig. 92

right

space is organised into smaller zones by the structural frame, which provides separation across inferred interstitial thresholds on a tartan grid

49

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

INTEGRATION

50

Research Thesis

Integration between the singular figure and the general frame as reconciled by the field condition is a primary determinant in the architecture of the New Universities as much as the Aula. The mediation of the parts within a whole was not merely an architecture concept, but a manifestation of a greater ethos of integration, which served to align the individual within a mass society. In both cases, integration requires an overarching concept for the campus or field which is capable of tolerating heterogeneous elements in such a resilient manner as to make difference at once exceptional and at the same time integral.

As a project which must interface with an existing condition of the campus - and moreover represent the condition of the campus in architectural form the Aula must appear as a autonomous figure which is simultaneously embedded in the existing campus field. To achieve this duality the Aula presents a janus-face orientation to two different conditions to which it responds. Two distinct elevations respond to and heighten two distinct conditions. At the campus centre to the north, the Aula delineates one boundary of a quadrangle presenting a civic face to the newly-charged public space by means of enclosure. This elevation is compositional, and stands apart from neighbouring buildings as a representational facade. Conversely, to the south, the Aula reinforces an existing ambiguously defined street condition by presenting a 100m long concourse to sharply define the latent street condition. This elevation is infrastructural, as the concourse attaches to adjacent

buildings, integrating them into one continuous interior.

The repetitive tectonic order of this elevation suggests later expansion along its axis in order to interface with further existing buildings, creating a street within the building to mirror and heighten the street condition without.

An integrative field condition will permit freedom of each part to express its individuality within the system as a whole. As an infill project within the existing campus, the Aula is inserted into the field in such a way as to revalidate the urban pattern and overlay an updated planning grid over its existing layout. Future development can be therefore determined by the interface of the pre-existing campus arrangement and the superimposed Aula grid; whose integration and simultaneous interference generates fissures and misalignments which resist a totalising integration. Instead, these faults establish the potentiality of accident to generate new possibilities in future development.

2 Urban Interiors — The Microcosm within the City

Fig. 93

Research Thesis

previous page

the inhabited facade of the concourse extends beyond the main aula hall and connects into adjacent campus buildings Fig.94

right

to the north, the aula encloses a new quadrangle, creating an outdoor room at the nucleus of the campus Fig. 95

below

a small ‘figure’ which acts as a porch is rotated to establish relational axes with existing building entrances - the resulting cruciform is inscribed in the quad’s paving

Fig. 96

left

the long horizontal concourse integrates the various programmes housed in the cabinet towers - acting as an internal street and an infra-structural route between adjoining buildings

51

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

52

Research Thesis

Coda

Research Thesis

Implications of Campus Theory Coda In the postwar period, the primacy of the interests of the state in higher education took hold not only in the UK, but within a geopolitical scene of education and scientific training in the context of the Cold War. In the UK specifically, this manifested in government HE subvention which democratised access to university education, in tandem with the New Universities programme, whose physical outputs are studied in chapter one. However this was not exclusively a British phenomenon, with ideas on campus planning transgressing national borders, especially between England, Europe, and the United States. Profound socio-economic shifts occurred in the postwar period in the US, where the Knowledge Economy and the transmission of information rapidly overtook industry, most notably in urban areas. Where once industry had dominated US cities through the production of manufactured resources; human resources would come to dominate postwar urban environments. Dober states that ‘we thus find something new in the way of a university concept, a clustering effect - a colloidal mix in an urban area - of many kinds of institutions’, referring specifically to the Education-Industrial Complex at urban campuses such as MIT, Boston.54 This mutuality between clusters of educational and industrial urban sites established economic and physical synapses between the university and the city. The notion of the Univercity, largely absent from British urban areas, took hold in earnest in the US postwar campus in the city.

Transatlantic shifts in the purpose and instrumentality of higher education resulted in a concerted evolution in the field of campus planning catalysed by the influence of International Modernism. In modernism, architects found the ideal parameters for an architectural style capable of capturing the new values of higher education and the EIC, an architecture no longer bound by a historically institutional appearance of a quintessential campus enclave but something more radical and urban. Modernism had already been diffused globally and so accelerated information transfer within the field of campusplanning across borders, with each local site and academic plan giving rise to particular conditions in the mutation of the International Style. Furthermore, the implications of the ability to prototype city-planning solutions through campus-planning concepts rendered university buildings the prime focus of architectural experimentation.55 In the Western world, modernism became a candidate for an international language for higher education and democratic initiatives in society, overturning historic hierarchies and conventions in favour of an architecture which could, through its very form, engender positive civic action. America and the continent would embrace the city in university development programmes to a greater degree than the UK, whose attempts at creating de novo urban institutions were inconsistent and never realised on a large scale.

54

Richard P. Dober, ‘Universities in the U.S.A’, in University Planning and Design: A Symposium, Architectural Association Paper 3, (London: Lund Humphries, 1967), p. 120.

55

Stefan Muthesius, op. cit. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 251.

Fig. 97

previous page

Candilis, Josic & Woods scheme for the reconstruction of Römerberg, Frankfurt operates between the scales of a single building and the city. The mat-building form and covered streets in this scheme would later reappear in their project for the campus of the Freie Universität Berlin

53

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

FU Berlin

IIT

54

Research Thesis

In Europe, the significance of higher education to society - and the parallel significance of the campus to the city - was identified by architects, whose freedom to experiment with campus planning concepts were magnified and projected onto the city. For the architects of the Free University of Berlin, the campus was not only a small city, but the city was an upscaled campus: ‘the city itself, which is the natural habitat of western man, is the […] university. We see the city as the total school, not the school as a micro-community’.56 The similarity between their mat-building proposals for FU Berlin and the reconstruction of Frankfurt city centre captures the radicalism of the statement, and reveals the significance of the city to campus analogy in positing a new sociological order where physical and social integration were of vital importance. At FU Berlin, the streets of the city are substituted for the internal network of corridors which permitted free circulation of individuals and groups, facilitating the exchange of ideas.57 In this instance, the direct transposition of urban patterns to the university, and vice-versa, illustrates the parity between campus and city; where to parse the campus and city into an abstracted series of relationships would be to examine fundamentally similar patterns of association.

In the US, not only were campuses built in cities and spliced into existing urban layouts, but campus-planning itself was applied to an array of urban development schemes outside of the domain of the university.

In tandem to the withdrawal of urban industries from US cities, the relevance of the EIC as a vehicle by which to resist the terminal decline of industry coupled with the burgeoning knowledge sector offered the opportunity for economic and physical urban restructuring. One prime case is the creation of the Illinois Institute of Technology on blighted land in Chicago, the Institute would house university functions alongside corporate industries to enable communication in the fields of higher education and industry. The flattened site lay within the largest land clearing for urban redevelopment in the US, leaving only the grid street network as a twodimensional remnant.58 The campus would occupy a superblock composed of combined city blocks, inferring from the outset a cellular spatial plan. For the architect of the IIT Campus, Mies van der Rohe, the extension of the city grid over the site as an ordering device and a tabula rasa condition offered the precondition to test his ‘basic laws’ of architectural design. The isotropism of the grid appeals to these laws, for Mies the structure of a campus ‘is a general idea.

56

Shadrach Woods, ‘The Education Bazaar’, in Harvard Educational Review, 4 (1969), p.119.

57

Gabriel Feld, ‘Shad’s Idée Fixe: Berlin Free University and the Search for Principles of Organization’, in Free University Berlin: Candilis Josic, Woods, Schiedhelm, Exemplary Projects, 3 (London: Architectural Association, 1999), p. 115.

58

Sharon Haar, The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 59.

Fig. 98, 99

below

Comparative plans for Römerberg reconstruction and FU Berlin by Candilis, Josic, Woods & Schiedhelm as continuous urban frameworks - the grid is used in both city (left) and campus (right) to partition the mat-building and orchestrate pedestrian movement around programmatic cells

Coda — Implications of Campus Theory

Research Thesis

And, although each building is a single solution, it is not motivated as such’.59 The basic laws of Miesian Modernism had already been tested at the Bauhaus, and canonised at IIT in Mies’ design of the architecture curriculum and of the campus, as a didactic exercise in his basic laws. Where other campuses studied here intended to exploit the physical environment of the university as a utopianist project - aiming to encourage a consensual society of the university - the IIT Campus was a lesson in Miesian Modernism and its implications for city planning.

The existing city grid was superimposed onto the site, however, by subverting the typical properties of the grid, Mies manipulates the spacing between buildings from the street edge to create an extended landscape curtilage to each building. The effect is that buildings which typically form a frame in the urban grid become perceptible figures in space due to the open field in which they can be seen as independent objects. The spatial manipulation of the field opens up a new dimension to the space of the grid. By using the grid as an ordering device balancing architecture with landscape, rather than prescribing the morphological extent of each building, the IIT Campus modifies the properties of the Chicago grid in order to posit a new form of grid-based urbanism. Space at the IIT Campus is open to the city around it, and takes on a fluid property by virtue of the irregularity in the relationships between figures on the field. Buildings are shifted on their cardinal axes and appear to slip past one another, which has the effect of creating diagonal views between openedged quadrangles. Whilst the campus is clearly ordered by the city plan, the disintegration of the street wall, the continuity of landscape around the whole campus, and the plastic spatial condition invert the rigid linearity of the grid in the city itself.

Fig. 100

above

IIT Campus as pavilions in the field - a cohesive tectonic language and a unified landscape treatment both based on the order of the grid render IIT a total environment

Fig. 101

For Mies, the use of the urban order of the grid as a planning device for the campus allowed the architect to critique the space of the city through the transformation of its defining spatial order. The relational value of buildings in the campus is heightened by the common field on which to perceive the campus as a whole entity, acting as a counter-site to the space of the American city, where all buildings form a frame to an absent figure - exemplified by the continuous street wall. Counteracting the rigid spatial planning of the American city, Miesian space ‘pointed towards the dematerialization of 59

Werner Blaser, Mies van der Rohe, IIT Campus: Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2002), pp. 14-15.

above left

partial view of the IIT Campus along Dearborn Street - figures in the field are ordered by the ubiquitous city grid however, the properties of the grid are modified to create a spatial experience based on diagonal rather than orthogonal sightlines and increased freedom of movement

55

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

Research Thesis

architecture’, according to Frampton, it led ‘to the mutation of built form into shifting planes suspended in diaphanous space’.60 In the IIT Campus, space is a fluid, which allows the individual to perceive the architectural figures and their interrelationships. In Chicago, space is a solid delineated by a ‘corridorstreet’, where architectural figures are subsumed into the street wall becoming a frame without a subject. Insofar as the IIT Campus proposed a new spatial order for the American city by transforming its existing properties, it can be considered a heterotopian site, mirroring the city itself, whilst consciously realised as a critical counter-site. As a heterotopia, the IIT Campus illustrates how the campus establishes and challenges the city in its own form in addition to its ‘other’. Not only is the campus mimetic, but it is an active agent of change in the form of the city - facilitated by the modernist fixation with the city which provided conditions conducive to implementing comprehensive urban change.

Miesian basic laws expounded by the form of the campus were inscribed in state legislation for the subsequent redevelopment of Chicago’s South Side, and campus-planning became an architectural approach to housing and community complexes.61 Not only were Miesian ideas of space promulgated in Chicago through state legislation, but the reordering of the grid as described through the spatial operations in previous paragraphs were repeated in projects in the centre of the city. Mies’ critical project of the IIT Campus was transposed around the origin point of the Chicago grid in urban precincts for commercial, government, and residential use. The use of the grid to order a field of buildings which reconceptualises the spatiality of the American city can be understood through projects such as Lake Shore Drive, the Illinois Center, and Federal Center, which share common spatial properties with the IIT Campus.

Fig. 102

above

plans of Mies’ Federal Center (top) and IIT Campus (below) at points along Dearborn Street - in both projects, the city block with rigid street walls is eroded through the creation of recessed pockets of space Fig. 103

left

view of the Federal Center which transposes the figure/ground disposition of the IIT campus into the city in the holistic unity of the frame, figure, and field

Both IIT and the Federal Center are aggregated around Dearborn Street as it traverses the city, opening squares off its axis. Within the space of Chicago’s high-rise core, the compressive space of the street wall evaporates in a Miesian precinct; the liquid space and unprescribed movement pattern

56

60

Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 5th edn (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1980), p. 265.

61

Sharon Haar, op. cit. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 59.

Coda — Implications of Campus Theory

Research Thesis

of Federal Plaza, as one example, opens up diagonal routes through the city block. In the Federal Center complex, campus urbanism was transposed into the city, notable as the permeable figure-ground of the Center and IIT Campus consist of similar footprints. In Mies’ projects for Chicago, a consistent tectonic language between projects for the campus and the city illustrate clearly how the spatial properties of the field condition were considered directly transposable through basic laws of organisation. The semblance of uniformity across Mies’ projects bely a host of interrelationships between campuses and the city found across Chicago in particular, where a true political dialogue exists between urban university precincts and the city itself.

That the campus no longer be considered an autonomous enclave, but a physical node in a political urban pattern of associations with greater implications for urban planning suggests the relevance of campus theory for urbanism beyond the closed city block. Surpassing this, is the conception of a campus theory as a mode of ordering space in the city beyond the institutional boundaries of the university; but as a logic which can be applied to all scale and manner of urban projects. This hypothesis of the campus, as a twofold strategy which, on the one hand; operates on the social dimension by eliciting a sense of urbanity as examined through the New Universities, and on the other; operates in the spatial dimension by reordering the established urbanism of the city as examined through global examples, aims to establish a politically active understanding of space. Through establishing a relational value through the scales of architecture; from tectonic element, to building, to campus, to city, we can understand the field condition as an index to interpret the city at large through the microcosm of the campus.

104a

104b

104d

104e

Fig. 104

below

views of the Federal Center (top) and IIT Campus (below) showing the affiliation between campus-planning and cityplanning relationships A-C D-F

the Federal Center erodes the street wall dissipating the compressive space of the city the IIT Campus consists of similar spatial relationships between a cohesive spatial frame

104c

104f

57

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

Research Thesis

The Campus beyond the University Conclusion Spaces of Edification entails the fecund yet often fractured relationship of the university to society - the campus to the city. For the New Universities in England, the university is a closed society of its own making reflected in the separation of the campus from their environs. A sui generis temporal and spatial condition defines these campuses which, notwithstanding their reference to historic urban models, used their city-like configurations to suggest new patterns of urban planning. For specific urban institutions studied in Manchester, a new form of relationship between the campus and host city is formed by the spatial arrangement of the precinct type. The precinct translates the campus type to an urban setting, and posits the possibility of the campus as a critical countersite: a heterotopia which simultaneously challenges and affirms the form of the city. The implementation of this theory, whereby campus-planning concepts have been applied in extramural urban settings, is tested in the project for the Aula in Manchester, and is separately studied internationally in case studies in Chicago. From these studies in distinct locations we can conclude that the field condition which forms the basis of campus theory has implications beyond the realm of the university and retains value in modern society.

Campus planning logic, which privileges the relationships between buildings over their physical singularity, suggests how the space of the city can be reordered to create a common space of appearance through the precinctual planning of a field condition. This thesis subverts the misconception that modernist architecture exclusively privileges the object building by illustrating a range of case studies where the cultivation of a society, namely the society of a university, is conditioned through the concerted design of the figure, frame, and field; that is, common space, and architectural form which defines it. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the concept of a spatial field within which interrelationships between architectural figures and frames are made salient can serve city planning on a level beyond the autonomous building. This thesis considers that it is in the reciprocity of utopianism and urbanism where campus theory surpasses a self-referential architectural theory and becomes symbolic of the university and the values it represents, and suggests how this reciprocity might extend beyond the university. For the city at large, campus theory can be a useful instrument to configure cohesive urban ensembles and establish the preconditions for a civic symbolism based upon the political organisation of the space. Consequently, it is through this, the principle of edification - where space and form foster urban commonality and embody symbolic values - that the potentiality of the campus to the city is revealed.

58

Fig. 105

opposite page

the precinct as a cohesive urban ensemble - the campus extension at the University of Leeds integrates a unified agglomeration of buildings with an extensive pedestrian network on the ground and at aerial levels, demonstrating how the campus is the ‘total’ environment par excellence, bridging the scales of architecture and urbanism

Research Thesis

59

List of Figures

Fig. 29 pp. 18-19 photograph of model University Campus Model <https://www. flickr.com/ photos/149590996@ N07/31317886012/in/ album-72157673593 395013/> [accessed 19 November 2021]

Fig. 41 p. 26 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 1

cover photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 2

frontispiece photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 3

p. 5 photograph author’s own - 2020

Fig. 4

p. 5 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 18 p. 11 diagram author’s own - 2021

Fig. 5

p. 5 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 19 p. 12 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 30 p. 20 photograph/drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 46 p. 28 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 6

p. 5 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 20 p. 12 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 31 p. 20 photograph/drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 47 p. 28 line drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 7

p. 5 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 21 p. 13 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 32 p. 20 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 48 p. 29 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 8

p. 5 photograph author’s own - 2021

chapter one

Fig. 49 p. 29 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 9

p. 5 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 22 p. 15 photograph of model University Campus Model <https://www. flickr.com/ photos/149590996@ N07/31348198421/in/ album-72157673593 395013/> [accessed 19 November 2021]

Fig. 33 p. 21 photograph of drawing Square 3 <https://www. flickr.com/ photos/149590996@ N07/31336093332/> [accessed 18 December 2021]

Fig. 10 p. 5 photograph author’s own - 2021 Fig. 11 p. 5 photograph author’s own - 2021 Fig. 12 p. 5 photograph author’s own - 2021 Fig. 13 p. 5 photograph author’s own - 2021

60

Fig. 17 p. 11 photograph Aerial view of the Forum and Exedrae <https://exhibits. library.uic.edu/ the-historic-netschcampus/a-stonedropped-in-a-pondof-water?path=thehistoric-netschcampus-walking-tour> [accessed 17 December 2021]

Courtesy of the University of Essex Archives. Special Collections, Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex

Courtesy of the University of Essex Archives. Special Collections, Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex

Courtesy of the University of Essex Archives. Special Collections, Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex

Fig. 42 p. 26 photograph author’s own - 2021 Fig. 43 p. 26 photograph author’s own - 2021 Fig. 44 p. 27 line drawing author’s own - 2021 Fig. 45 p. 27 line drawing author’s own - 2022

Fig. 50 p. 29 photograph author’s own - 2021 Fig. 51 p. 29 line drawing author’s own - 2021 Fig. 52 p. 30 photograph author’s own - 2021 Fig. 53 p. 30 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 34 pp. 22-23 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 54 p. 30 line drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 14 p. 6 photograph Great Court and Circle Forum, ca. 1969 <https:// chicagocollections. org/membership/ consortium-currentmembers/uic> [accessed 16 December 2021]

Fig. 23 p. 16 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 35 p. 23 photograph author’s own - 2021

chapter two

Fig. 24 p. 16 plan drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 36 p. 23 diagrams author’s own - 2021

Fig. 55 p. 31 Peter Sainsbury photograph of drawing

Fig. 25 p. 16 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 37 p. 24 line drawing author’s own - 2021

introduction

Fig. 26 p. 16 plan drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 38 p. 24 line drawing author’s own - 2021

From the Cruickshank and Seward archive at Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections

Fig. 15 p. 9 photograph author’s own - 2020

Fig. 27 p. 17 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 39 p. 25 line drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 16 p. 10 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 28 p. 17 plan drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 40 p. 25 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 56 p. 32 photograph of model Wilson, Hugh and Womersley, Lewis, Manchester Educational Precinct, 1967 (Manchester: The Coporation of Manchester, 1967)

Fig. 57 p. 32 plan drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 71 p. 39 line drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 91 p. 49 line drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig.103 p. 56 line drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 58 p. 32 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 72 p. 40 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 92 p. 49 line drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig.104 p. 57 photographs author’s own - 2021

Fig. 59 p. 32 plan drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 73 p. 40 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 93 p. 50 render author’s own - 2021

conclusion

17

Fig. 60 p. 33 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 74 pp. 40-41 line drawing/collage author’s own - 2021

Fig. 94 p. 51 render author’s own - 2021

Fig. 105 p. 59 photograph author’s own - 2021

22

Fig. 61 p. 33 plan drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 75 p. 42 photograph author’s own - 2019

Fig. 95 p. 51 line drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 62 p. 34 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 76 p. 42 photograph author’s own - 2019

Fig. 96 p. 51 line drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 63 p. 35 view south from shopping square Wilson, Hugh and Womersley, Lewis, Manchester Educational Precinct, Interim Report (Manchester: The Coporation of Manchester, 1964)

Fig. 77 pp. 42-43 rendered elevations author’s own - 2021

coda

Fig. 78 p. 43 photograph author’s own - 2019

Fig. 97 p. 52 Structuralism, Candilis Josic Woods <https://caruso.arch. ethz.ch/project/737> [accessed 28 December 2021]

Fig. 64 p. 35 site for university church Wilson, Hugh and Womersley, Lewis, Manchester Educational Precinct, Interim Report (Manchester: The Coporation of Manchester, 1964)

Fig. 80 p. 44 plan drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 65 p. 35 mathematics tower and lawn Wilson, Hugh and Womersley, Lewis, Manchester Educational Precinct, Interim Report (Manchester: The Coporation of Manchester, 1964)

Fig. 83 p. 45 render author’s own - 2021

Fig. 66 p. 36 diagram author’s own - 2021

Fig. 86 p. 47 line drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 67 p. 37 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 87 p. 47 render author’s own - 2021

Fig. 68 p. 38 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 88 p. 47 render author’s own - 2021

Fig.100 p. 55 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 69 p. 38 line drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 89 p. 48 render author’s own - 2021

Fig.101 p. 55 line drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 70 p. 39 diagram author’s own - 2021

Fig. 90 p. 49 render author’s own - 2021

Fig.102 p. 56 plan drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 79 p. 43 photograph author’s own - 2021

Fig. 81 p. 44 line drawing author’s own - 2021 Fig. 82 p. 44 render author’s own - 2021

Fig. 84 p. 46 render author’s own - 2021 Fig. 85 p. 47 line drawing author’s own - 2021

Fig. 98 p. 54 1963 competition drawing for the reconstruction of the centre of FrankfurtRömerberg, by Candilis, Josic, Woods and Scheidhelm <https://www. architectural-review. com/essays/thestrategies-of-matbuilding> [accessed 28 December 2021] Fig. 99 p. 54 The Free University of Berlin, Plan of Upper Level, 1963-64 <https://www. researchgate.net/ figure/The-FreeUniversity-of-BerlinPlan-of-Upper-Level1963-64-SourceFree-University_ fig2_340000135> [accessed 28 December 2021]

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Universities Higher Education and Campus Planning

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Zamarian, Patrick, The Architectural Association in the Postwar Years (London: Lund Humphries, 2020)

Haar, Sharon, The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011)

Zomer, Arend, and Benneworth, Paul, ‘The Rise of the University’s Third Mission’, Reform of Higher Education in Europe (2011)

Hale, Jack, and Rhead, Eddy, eds., Knowledge and Work (Manchester: The Modernist Society, 2016)

Theory and History of Architecture and Urbanism

Hardingham, Samantha, and Rattenbruy, Kester, Supercrit #1 Cedric Price: Potteries Thinkbelt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007) Harwood, Elain, Powers, Alan, and Saumarez Smith, Otto, eds., Oxford and Cambridge, Twentieth Century Architecture II (London: the Twentieth Century Society, 2013) Hebbert, Michael, ‘The Campus and the City - a Design Revolution Explained’, Journal of Urban Design (2018) Hoeger, Kerstin, and Christiaanse, Kees, eds., Campus and the City: Urban Design for the Knowledge Society (Zurich: GTA Verlag, 2007) Kerr, Clark, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963) Lubbock, Jules, University of Essex: Vision and Reality (University of Essex, 2014)

62

May, Tim, and Perry, Beth, ‘Cities, Knowledge and Universities: Transformations in the Image of the Intangible’, Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006)

Mardell, Joshua, ‘Learning from York’, Scroope, 22 (2013)

Abramson, Daniel M., Obsolescence: An Architectural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) Allen, Stan, Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012) Aureli, Pier Vittorio, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011) Avermaete, Tom, and others, eds., ‘Modernities’, OASE Journal for Architecture, 109 (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2021) Avermaete, Tom, Avidar, Pnina, and others, eds., ‘Autonomous Architecture and the Project of the City’, OASE Journal for Architecture, 62 (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2003) Avermaete, Tom, Decroos, Bart, and others, eds., ‘Microcosm: Searching for the City in its Interiors’, OASE Journal for Architecture, 101 (Rotterdam, NAi Publishers, 2018)

Barkow, Frank, and others, Ruins of Modernity, AA Documents, 4 (London: AA Publications, 1998)

Guiton, Jacques, ed. The Ideas of Le Corbusier: On Architecture and Urban Planning (New York: George Braziller, 1981)

Beeren, Wim, and others, eds., Het Nieuwe Bouwen: Previous History, (Delft: Delft University Press, 1982)

Harnack, Maren, and others, eds., Adaptive Re-Use: Strategies for Post-War Modernist Housing (Berlin: Jovis, 2020)

Booth, Philip, and Taylor, Nicholas, Cambridge New Architecture (London: Leonard Hill, 1970)

Hays, K. Michael, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late AvantGarde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010)

Boyd Whyte, Iain, ed., Modernism and the Spirit of the City, (New York: Routledge, 2003)

Hebbert, Michael, ‘Old Modernism, New Urbanism’, Movimiento Moderno: Patrimonio Cultural y Sociedad, (Docomomo IB, 2016)

Brook, Richard, ‘Manchester Modern: The Shape of the City’ (2010) Brook, Richard, ‘The National Computing Centre: “White Heat”, Modernization and Postwar Manchester’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 70 (University of California Press, 2020) Brook, Richard, ‘The Renewal of Post-War Manchester: Regionality and the Architecture of Cruickshank & Seward’ (Unpublished doctoral thesis, 2017) Brook, Richard, ‘UMIST, The Evolution of an Institution: Personnel and Politics’, The Modernist, 5 (2012) Brook, Richard, Manchester Modern (Manchester: The Modernist Society, 2017) Bullock, Nicholas, Building the Post-War World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (London: Routledge, 2002) Busquets, Joan, Chicago: Two Grids between Lake and River (Applied Research and Design, 2017) Canniffe, Eamonn, ‘Urban Morphology and the Post-industrial City: Commercial Space in Manchester’, The Journal of Public Space, 1 (2016) Crinson, Mark, and Zimmerman, Claire, eds., Neo-Avant-Garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)

Heynen, Hilde, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique, 3rd edn, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) Leatherbarrow, David, Architecture Oriented Otherwise (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009) Lewis, John, Urban Structuring: Studies of Alison & Peter Smithson (London: Studio Vista, 1967) McCarter, Robert, Aldo van Eyck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015) McEwan, Cameron, ‘The Field as a Critical Project’, Building Material, 23 (2020) Mertins, Detlef, Modernity Unbound: Other Histories of Architectural Modernity, Architecture Words, 7 (London: AA Publications, 2011) Pendlebury, John, and others, eds., Alternative Visions of PostWar Reconstruction: Creating the Modern Townscape (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015) Pimlott, Mark, ‘All the World’s a Stage: Artifice and Fiction in the Public Interior’, Quaderns, 272 (2019) Reinink, Wessel, Herman Hertzberger Architect (Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 1990) Risselada, Max, ed., Alison & Peter Smithson: A Critical Anthology (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2011)

Cullen, Gordon, The Concise Townscape (Abingdon: Routledge, 1961)

Risselada, Max, ed., The Space Between: Alison and Peter Smithson (Cologne: Walther König, 2017)

Dehaene, Michiel, and De Cauter, Lieven, eds., Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008)

Rowe, Colin, and Koetter, Fred, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978)

Domingo-Calabuig, Débora, Raúl Castellanos-Gómez and others, ‘The Strategies of Mat-Building’, Architectural Review, 1398 (2013) Eisenman, Peter, The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2006) Faiferri, Massimo, Re-invent: Reuse and transformation in Lacaton & Vassal’s Architecture, Sustainable and Affordable Housing Collection, 4 (Listlab, 2018) Foucault, Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008)

Saumarez Smith, Otto, Boom Cities: Architect- Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) Teerds, Hans, Grafe Christoph, and others, eds., ‘Table Settings: Reflections on Architecture with Hannah Arendt’, OASE Journal for Architecture, 106 (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2020) Vidler, Anthony, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism, Writing Architecture Series (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008) Waldheim, Charles, Landscape Urbanism: A General Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016)

Frampton, Kenneth, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980) Geers, Kersten, and Pančevac, Jelena, eds., The Urban Fact: A Reference Book on Aldo Rossi (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2021)

Relevant Literature and Reports

Gibberd, Frederick, Town Design (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959)

Bennetts Associates, Corridor Manchester: North Campus Strategic Regeneration Framework, (London: 2017)

Giedion, Sigfried, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1949)

Bennetts Associates, Manchester Piccadilly Strategic Regeneration Framework, (Manchester: 2018)

63

Carter, Sheelagh, ed., UMIST Union Handbook (Manchester: UMIST Union, 1975) Dodge, Martin, and Brook, Richard, ‘From Manufacturing Industries to a Services Economy: The Emergence of a ‘New Manchester’ in the Nineteen Sixties’, Making Post-War Manchester: Visions of an Unmade City (Manchester: 2016) Domingo-Calabuig, Débora, and Lizondo-Sevilla, Laura, ‘Uni-Heritage. European Postwar Universities Heritage: A Network for Open Regeneration’ (2019) Gasser, Bianca, and Meyer, Florian, eds., Campus of the Future: Hönggerberg 2040 Masterplan (Zurich: ETH Zurich, Real Estate Management, 2019)

The University of Manchester and the Manchester College of Science and Technology, Joint Submission to Manchester Corporation respecting Future Developments (Manchester: 1960) The University of Manchester, Estates Strategy 2010 - 2020 (Manchester: The University of Manchester, 2010) Tostóes, Ana, and others, eds., Education and Reuse, Docomomo Journal, 61 (Lisbon: Docomomo International, 2019) While, Aidan, and Short, Michael, ‘Place Narratives and Heritage Management: The Modernist Legacy in Manchester’, Area, 43 (Wiley, 2011)

Hartwell, Clare, Manchester: Pevsner City Guide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)

Wilson, Hugh and Womersley, Lewis, Manchester Educational Precinct 1967 (Manchester: The Coporation of Manchester, 1967)

Harwood, Elain, ‘White Light/White Heat: Rebuilding England’s Provincial Towns and Cities in the Sixties’, Twentieth Century Architecture, 6 (Twentieth Century Society, 2002)

Wilson, Hugh and Womersley, Lewis, Manchester Educational Precinct, Interim Report (Manchester: The Corporation of Manchester, 1964)

Hebbert, Michael, ‘The Manchester Skyline’, in disP - The Planning Review, 55:4 (2019)

Wilson, Hugh and Womersley, Lewis, Manchester Educational Precinct: A Review of the Plan, 1974 (Manchester: The Coporation of Manchester, 1974)

Hulme, Tom, After the Shock City: Urban Culture and the Making of Modern Citizenship (Boydell & Brewer, 2019) ICOMOS International Committee on Twentieth Century Heritage, Approaches to the Conservation of Twentieth-Century Cultural Heritage, 3rd edn, (Delhi: 2017) Manchester College of Science and Technology, Proposed Site for Development Scheme (Manchester: 1955) Nicholas, Rowland, City of Manchester Plan 1945 (Norwich: Jarrold & Sons, 1945) Ortolano, Guy, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Otero-Pailos, Jorge, and others, eds., Experimental Preservation (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016)

Archives Consulted Manchester Metropolitan University Archive - Visual Resource Centre Collection - Cruickshank and Seward Archive University of Manchester Archive - UMIST Planning and Development Committee Minutes - UMIST Development Plan Documents - Brief: Education Precinct

Related Essays by the Author

Peck, Jamie, and Ward, Kevin, eds., City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) Pendlebury, John, ‘Conservation Values, the Authorised Heritage Discourse and the Conservation-Planning Assemblage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 19:7 (2012) Prudon, Theodore H. M., and Normandin, Kyle, eds., Restoring Postwar Heritage, Preservation Technology Dossier, 8 (New York: Docomomo US, 2008) Readman, Paul, ‘Manchester: Shock Landscape?’, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), Ribot, Almudena, and others, Open City: Re- thinking the Postindustrial City (New York: Actar, 2020) Roberts, Bryony, Tabula Plena: Forms of Urban Preservation (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016) Rowe, Peter G., Civic Realism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997) Sharp, Dennis, ed., Manchester Buildings, Architecture North West, 19 (London: Corinthian Press, 1966) Sigler, Jennifer, and Whitman-Salkin, Leah, eds. Freedom of Use, The Incidents Series, 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2015) Smith, Laurajane, Uses of Heritage, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006)

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Carter, Benjamin, ‘The College and Campus: The Courts at Churchill College Cambridge’ (2020) Carter, Benjamin, ‘The Politics of the Urban University: The UMIST Campus and the City’ (2021) Carter, Benjamin, ‘Infrastructure/Megastructure: Forms of Consolidation at the UMIST Campus and the MEC Hall, Manchester’ (2021) Carter, Benjamin, ‘Transforming the Campus: Contested Heritage Narratives and the Critical Re-Interpretation of the Modernist Built Environment’ (2021) Carter, Benjamin, ‘UMIST in Postwar Society: Nation-Building and Urban Planning (2021)

Edifice Edification

noun

a large or massive structure

noun

the moral or intellectual instruction or improvement of someone

This thesis involves the relationship between the built environment, edifice, and higher education, edification, embodied in the symbolic form of the university campus.

University campuses — particularly those of the New Universities of the 1960s — are microcosmic representations of a society, where the holistically planned environment establishes the preconditions for the evolution of that society.

On the level of the individual and the collective, university campuses are thus examples of a total environment which contain the possibility of being didactic in their own right: informing behaviour and providing the formative conditions for individual selfrealisation and collective action.

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11

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

UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK USA USA USA

Cambridge Cambridge Leeds Colchester Norwich Coventry York Manchester Evanston Chicago Chicago

1958 1956 1960 1964 1964 1965 1963 1960 1968 1940 1963