County champion.

Unlike most schools of architecture, Portsmouth's new facility combines an assured handling of space and light with inspirational placemaking.

For some reason, schools of architecture are not usually memorable (or even pleasant) places in which to spend the formative years of one's artistic and professional life. It often seems surprising that marvellous work can emerge from such grim and gritty surroundings. There are quite a lot that are more or less all right, in the Cambridge, Otaniemi or Edinburgh manner, but the fine ones can be counted on the fingers of one hand: Auckland, Harvard, Copenhagen, Rice, and now Portsmouth.

Portsmouth used to be a truly nasty, gloomy architecture school, housed in what seemed like a commercial office block. The new school could not be more different. It is in Portsea, a tough part of the town, but a very important one, for it lies on the axis between the superbly honed masts of HMS Victory (Nelson's flagship moored as a museum in the harbour) and the civic square (one of the few proper pieces of city built in England in the anti-urban decades after the Second World War).(1) The school is at present at the most westerly end of the campus, and its presence goes a long way to refuting those who (sometimes rightly) sneer at the government's translation of the polytechnics into universities as a cheap trick to broaden Britain's higher education base. The school is by a team from the Hampshire County office led by Colin Stansfield Smith.(2) It is fundamentally U-shaped in plan, a parti turned into a quadrangle by the horrid presence of the university's Buckingham building which contains the geography department. This is at least as grim as the old architecture school and is a piece of utility heavy prefabrication which second-rate architects turned out by the mile to fulfil the aspirations of Wilson's '60s government to offer higher education to a vastly wider range of people than ever before. The ideal was noble, but unfortunately the places provided by the programme were often dreadful,(3) and the whole effort can now be seen as one of the contributing factors to the general decay of awareness in Britain of the importance of the res publica and the general triumph of the notion of quantity over quality.

All those buildings were created while Britain was comparatively rich. One of the extraordinary things about the new school is that it has been built at a time when the country has become poor (in European terms). Yet the new school makes a very strong notion of place: it establishes the colonising presence of university in one of the poorest parts of the city and, perhaps by its very nature, it will help to hoist the neighbourhood.

With great generosity, the new work stretches its arms out to embrace the tatty old Buckingham building and make it part of a new urban conversation. A pair of glass-covered pergolas connect the two and define the formal place between them. This is a still, elegant space in the middle of the run-down inner city, consciously made as an echo of the cloisters in which universities began. But this cloister is a thoroughly modern affair, made with a laminated timber structure that gives it much greater spans than the pointed arches of medieval construction, and it is of course much lighter. The result is less solemn than the Gothic original, but it will allow some of the traditional functions of the cloister: the amiable perambulation, the casual encounter, the enclosure of the ideal garden.

The pergolas lead you to the giant abstracted porticos of the school building itself. They are made in the same materials as the cloister: laminated timber and patent glazing. They have the kind of rather histrionic grandeur that reminds you of Aldo Rossi or Leon Krier at the height of their early '80s eloquence. But those architects, even when they built, were never able to create the slender, light elegance that Stansfield Smith has captured here. There is a gesture of welcome, and at the same time, a firm affirmation of the technology of our times as the thin edges of the glass articulate the sky over the solid, almost Roman, heavy laminated wood posts and beams of the trusses.(4)

After all this rather formal approach, the entrances to the new building are a bit underplayed, with simple glazed double doors at ground level and the same at the top of the stairs that rise on both sides of the middle part of the plan that contains a cafeteria on the ground floor, topped by the main lecture theatre, over which is the great clerestory-lit crit room.

But however you enter the building, you are almost immediately overwhelmed by the presence of its huge inner space. This full-height volume is a trope that is often used in modern office blocks, but very rarely to such effect: a sudden vertical whoosh of space greets you after the predominantly horizontal progression. Galleries look over it; a bridge flies to connect the crit room to the main body. At ground level, the volume is connected to the formal garden through the transparent walls of the cafeteria, the intermediary room that would be the great formal entrance, in an ordinary classical building (which this one sometimes suggests that it is).

Stansfield Smith calls the grand internal volume 'the forum' - a much more apposite Latin simile than atrium. It will plainly be a busy place, the social centre of the organisation, full with exhibitions and discussion. He talks happily of the changing nature of the university, and suggests that it is not impossible that the department could be devoted to completely different disciplines in a few years' time. (After all the architecture school is but a part of the faculty of the built environment and the geographers will come from their dull building across the court to enjoy the cafeteria and forum.)

The most important thing that Stansfield Smith has done is to make a series of places that are quite unforgettable. I hope that students will find it as enjoyable as the casual visitor like me. Yet to achieve the presence of the school, Stansfield Smith has had to marry several different programmes. The staff of the faculty (of whom he is one as a professor, though not head of school) voted for individual places in which to have private territory. These cells overlook the courtyard and the forum and reinforce the echo of monastery set up below. On the outer side of the U are larger spaces, workshops, seminar rooms and so on. The main studios are at the top of the building, well lit under big pitched roofs. They seem rather small to me(5) for the number of students that they will have to deal with, but the head of school, Wendy Potts, has worked out a system of 'luke-warm desking' which should allow the place to be pretty full most of the time, and avoid the gloomy, mucky feeling that most schools have, except for a few days before crits. Students from all six years are mixed up, so no group needs all the drawing boards at once. The system was used in the old building during the last academic year, and has been welcomed by staff and students alike, for the social structure is more like that of an atelier, rather than a conventional studio.

There is a third part of the place, almost separate behind the galleries to the west of the forum. Here is the 'resource centre' - the library, all the paper with the now essential electronic IT extensions. These floors have a generous internal staircase and become an almost autonomous part of the school - a slab of learning rather than the doing and being, which is what the rest of the establishment is about. The centre probably helps to relieve some of pressure on the studios.

The building is made as an experiment: in social relationships, between the several different disciplines that may use it, the past of academia and its present. In environmental terms the affair is very sophisticated, for the only part of it to be artificially cooled is the large lecture theatre. Elsewhere, the big thermal chimneys of the stair-shafts serve to evacuate unwanted heat: they are very sophisticated with mechanisms that can open, close, pump or suck air. The huge volume of the forum is controlled by a system of opening lights and velaria which are automatically operated by sensors of the external climate.(6) The internal and external brises soleil are further modifiers of the environment. The whole huge heat engine that is the building can plainly work, and be much more economical than ordinary ones, but it will need to be tuned, and Stansfield Smith believes that the process of adjusting it to serve its users over the seasons will make it a three-dimensional, practical teaching device in which students will learn about climate, light and the nature of materials.

Knowing the nature of schools, and particularly the operations that architectural students put them through, I doubt that the result of the occupation of the building will be much like the elegant pictures by Martin Charles shown here. Architectural students are very messy, and at the same time, they like to make big visual gestures. This building will allow them to do so in a kind and generous way. But it will always remind them of the essence of architecture - placemaking. They will never forget it: and I suspect, they will always love the place in which they were brought up.

1 By Teggin & Taylor (AR February 1977).

2 Colin Stansfield Smith is the County Architect of Hampshire, perhaps the most distinguished public architectural design office in the world, which under his aegis produced a host of marvellous schools and other public buildings (see for instance ARs July 1982, April 1985, July 1988, November 1990 inter alia). The Portsmouth architecture school, unlike many of the other fine products of the practice, is very much Stansfield Smith's own.

3 With some very distinguished exceptions, for instance the universities of York and Stirling.

4 These days, you cannot use conventional terms for the new structures, even one as seemingly traditional as this. The elegant structure has been worked out in collaboration with Buro Happold. The main body of the building is very simple: slabs are supported on the perimeter masonry walls and propped in mid-span by columns. The top floor is of timber and becomes a lightweight attic over a masonry podium.

5 The programme was cut for financial reasons, so a north wing, which would have contained more studio space was omitted.

6 And it is a neutral pressure zone for smoke control, so the volume has been allowed to be larger than usual in a public building. The lights in the roof open automatically in a fire and, combined with similar openings on the ground floor, create a smoke-free zone at the base of the forum.