CAMBRIDGE ARCHITECTURE
Winter/Spring 2005
51
architecture urbanism environmental issues • in the Cambridge city region
Faculty of English
SIDGWICK SITE RETHINK The masterplan for the Humanities on the Sidgwick site by architects Sir Hugh Casson and Neville Conder, following the Second World War, carried over the court form of development used for the Sciences on the Downing site and continued the tradition of collegiate building. The more regular programmatic nature of faculty accommodation does not lend itself to the more diverse, articulated structure and spatiality of the colleges, but a distinctive note was struck by elevating the buildings on piloti in accordance with modernist dogma. The subsequent development by other hands subverted the concept of linked buildings; the first of these, the History Faculty, was a freestanding object building and thereafter the Music School, the Law Faculty and new Divinity School were implemented in disregard of the originating conception in these formal respects. Recent installations for Criminology and English designed by Allies and Morrison add coherence to the overall site by infilling the matrix of plots thus formed, and by reworking the site landscaping which effects both a softening and a visual linkage between buildings on the western side of the campus and to the original Casson Conder development.