CLARE HALL CAMBRIDGE
Building a lost Ralph Erskine landscape in Cambridge Clare Hall is a college within the University of Cambridge specifically for graduate research students, postdoctoral researchers and those senior researchers, Lecturers, C Readers, Professors and distinguished colleagues from associated institutions in Cambridge who are elected as Fellows. It is a Centre for Advanced Study. The College also maintains the largest programme of visiting academics in either Oxford or Cambridge, who are recognised formally as Visiting Fellows. At its core lies the Anglo-Swedish Architect Ralph Erskine’s unique Founders’ building, recently designated by the Secretary of State as a truly outstanding example of 1960s Architecture, a maverick antidote to Brutalism. The buildings were built very much as he intended by our parent Clare College but the landscape between them was not. Funds ran out and Erskine’s delightful scheme remained unrealised. The previously unpublished plan was discovered in 2016 in the archive of ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design in Stockholm. We have wanted to build it ever since. It is strikingly and charmingly redolent of the small cobbled squares and passageways of Stockholm’s Gamla stan, its ancient core. Erskine intended the landscape to be the bejewelled setting for all of the architectural pieces that make up the College.
Alan Short MA, DipArch, PhD (Cantab) President of Clare Hall, Cambridge. The Professor of Architecture (1970), University of Cambridge
Instead, as Tony McGuirk, one of Erskine’s most important and loyal original assistants observed, ‘The completed spaces show little of the human interest, intimacy and richness of Erskine and are now looking forlorn due the materials and character in which they were executed’. Tony has helped us translate the 1960s intent into modern construction practice. We call it a Recovery Plan and we are delighted to present it to you here. It is recovering an important post-war urban landscape by a world star. The scheme is completely described technically and ready to build. It can be realised in eight discrete increments. Each piece of the jigsaw puzzle has been carefully costed. The College would be pleased to name walks, squares and gardens as permanent pieces of the fabric of the College and Cambridge University after principal benefactors, subject of course to our Governing Body’s approval.
Views through the Gamla stan (courtesy of Elain Harwood, Historic England) and Clare Hall in 1968
The architectural critic Kurachek wrote, ‘The College’s domesticity is palpable... its passageways to the ground floor flats and upper levels sheltered and understated’. As Cambridge’s Professor Alan Short explains, ‘It completely inverted the norm. It filled the quad instead of lining it, and that dense collection of spaces for living, working, eating, talking and reading, conjured up the setting for a completely new community’... It feels like Erskine was emphasising the quotidian nobility of academic life without conceding to it any of its civic monumentality.’* * Jan-Carlos Kurachek, ‘Community and Collaboration’, RIBA Journal, 31 October 2016.
Ralph Erskine’s original but unbuilt scheme in the Stockholm archive.
The Recovery Scheme for the landscape (Plan by McGuirk Watson Architects).
The archived drawing (opposite) shows a fine weave of clay paviors, criss-crossed by stone pathways, perhaps a skit on Harvard Yard, with water-filled pools and canals filled by Erskine’s extraordinary timber rainwater chutes. Sketches show the type of surfaces and ground planting envisaged. The new scheme recreates Erskine’s beautiful route to the Porters’ Lodge and the Bollinger Suite, lined with new places to meet outdoors, a terrace to the College Bar and another 80 seats on the Dining Hall Terrace, an animated and delightful Family Walk, new gardens in the courtyard houses and a water garden in our East Asia-inspired Courtyard. The scheme naturally divides into discrete landscaped spaces and features and can be built incrementally. Naming each outdoor space after its benefactor in the Cambridge tradition will reinforce the historical narrative of the College.
Eight landscaped places costed by Faithful & Gould (less contingencies and VAT)
Total cost is estimated at £1.147million.The Herschel Road entrance £59k, Scholars’ Walk £195k, Family Walk £236k and the Dining Court £123k.The College goldfish are looking for £47k to expand their home into an East Asia-inspired water garden. We must thank our Life Member Professor Ann Goldstein very very warmly for funding the design work to get us to this exciting stage.
If you would like to make a contribution towards the Erskine Vision of Clare Hall, please visit our website: www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/support-us-2019, where you will find safe and secure ways to send a gift, wherever you are in the world. If you have any questions about making a gift, please contact Dr Marie Janson, Development Director of Clare Hall, on mj475@cam.ac.uk or 01223 760962
Registered Charity no. 1137491
There are numerous opportunities to fund specific parts of the plan and we will gratefully provide public recognition in return. This initiative is spearheaded by our new President, Alan Short,The Professor of Architecture at Cambridge University. If you would like to discuss the opportunities for philanthropic support, do contact Professor Short directly at President@clarehall.cam.ac.uk Clare Hall, Herschel Road, Cambridge, CB3 9AL Tel: +44 1223 3323603 www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk