Learning curve: on a difficult site and with a complicated programme, the architects have generated a building that offers many forms of leisure to its academic community.

Universities used to be forbidding places, with large and pompous buildings headed by inscriptions in Latin, and campuses dotted with warnings to keep off the grass. The passer-by was supposed to know that scholarship required a respectful silence, and if a certain intellectual snobbery was implied, so be it.

Nowadays politicians favour expansion and seek efficiency through economic competition, so universities have become more inviting and hospitable, less ivory towers than night clubs with lecture halls attached, or so you might think from their wilder TV commercials. Nottingham is a relatively old and respected university, but its early twentieth-century campus was set up around a park which had been donated to the people of the city by Jesse Boot, founder of the chemist chain. This park centres on a huge boating lake, with a small pavilion at the east end offering refreshments to the public.

Burned down in 1998, this pavilion needed to be replaced, but at the same time the university was seeking an opportunity to exhibit some of its D. H. Lawrence Archive. The idea arose of an enlarged pavilion to include the Lawrence exhibition, which would act as an intermediary institution between university and outside world while keeping faith with Boot's original intentions for the park. Lottery money was applied for and a limited competition organized, but the Lottery bid failed. The university decided to go ahead anyway, adding a 250 seat theatre and a seminar room to make a full-blown arts centre. They commissioned as architects Marsh:Grochowski, authors of one of the leading schemes in the competition.

Since it stands just across the lawn from the university's music and arts faculties, the building can be envisaged by the university as their satellite. But for the people of Nottingham, it offers a focal space on the lake to stop for an ice cream or cup of tea, easily obtained from a public kiosk which projects from the building. Having bought from this kiosk, people might patronize the cafe and drop into the exhibition, and so progress to the braver move of buying a theatre ticket to see a local or university production. The building bridges different social worlds.

The complex combines an unorthodox mixture of functions with a very exposed site that demands to be addressed in all directions. The clear starting point was a small terrace already established at the end of the lake by the old building. It had been a waterside court flanked by symmetrical wings which stretched as far as the water, and the wing ends that survived the fire have been retained as terminal pavilions with seats. The idea of the court as public place was reinvented in the form of a small semicircular amphitheatre dropped into the lake edge. In everyday use, its steps encourage casual sitting about, but its focal shape is a reminder of the adjacent theatre, for doors in the building open onto the space, and windows, when uncurtained, enjoy the lake view. So the amphitheatre offers the possibility of a setting for summer evening performances with the dying sun reflected in the lake, or becoming an outdoor rehearsal space during the day. ulian Marsh, the partner in charge, resisted the temptation to d evelop the whole building around the axis of the amphitheatre, which would have left it too dominant. Instead he placed the theatre asymmetrically, pushing it northward and marking the amphitheatre axis only with the tiny projecting bay of the kiosk. Since it was left open rather than enclosed by the side wings as before, the amphitheatre also became part of a newly complete lakeside walk.

The main entrance to the university by vehicle is the crossroads to south-east of the site, also the point from which the new pavilion presents itself most starkly across the lawns against a backdrop of trees and older, grander university buildings. It needed a large-scale elevation to command this site, while as the cafe and theatre faced the other way there was not much internal content to express. Marsh opted for a long plain colonnade which makes the whole southeast front into an entrance, offering shelter to people promenading in the park. In style it hints at the early twentieth-century NeoClassicism of the original university buildings without going as far as having recognizable columns with capitals and bases. The sheltered space with its stone wall and paving offers small recesses with seats, and some carved stone tablets from the old building have been re-used, preserving its memory. Cleverly, the portico also works in the other direction as a covered way between the newly sited car park to the nort h and the corner of the lake. The earlier car park had been sited next to the lake, destroying its tranquillity and sterilizing the landscape with unnecessary tarmac.

If the two sides already described are both fronts, the third facing north is definitely a back, though it can still be seen. Here are backstage rooms for the theatre ending in a corner green-room, and a loading dock for scenery is accommodated as discreetly as possible in the north-west corner. Contrast between back and front could scarcely be greater between this corner and the southern one, where a curved projecting canopy announces the entrance to the glass-walled cafe, and the bay with the sales kiosk projects at two levels to announce the break in the body of the building between cafe and theatre. This is a building in which corners figure as prominently as elevations, making it finally more modern than Neo-Classical.

It was easiest to start with the outside because the site was so difficult and demanding, but the plan is also interesting. The placing of the colonnade along the path from car park to lake sets one edge, while the theatre was placed to contain the lakeside amphitheatre, facing into the circle while letting the space taper to the north. This set up a triangular plan in which the theatre (a flexible box) and the colonnade (a linear route) are the anchoring gestures. The exhibition space for Lawrence's paintings was best toplit and so brought to the inside as a modified square with a single central column. Daylight is admitted by a lantern and bounced off a textile covered funnel-shaped reflector built off the column. This room doubles as a foyer for the theatre, but holds its own formally because of the square plan and unusual section.

The theatre needed to be flexible with variable seating and so was given rectangular form, but the sectional profile with curved copper-clad roofs and a central fin of servicing duct is important for the long-range profile, establishing the building's massing hierarchy. The theatre's upper gallery left space beneath to absorb quite invisibly all those parts best unseen: kitchen and stores and coat space, disguised on the outside by the kiosk. The cafe developed in the foyer, profiting from the dynamic effect of the staircase and the main angle shift between theatre and colonnade. This works well, producing a space that shows its in-betweenness, and that opens up towards lake, view, afternoon sun and the public focus of the amphitheatre. The only full glass screen wall in the building combines with the continuity of the projecting canopy to make this space both inviting from the outside and a joy to be in. Away from the view, towards its back end, the space is toplit, while light also falls on the stairs from clerestories above. The route to the upper gallery of the theatre does not plunge into gloom at the top of the stairs, but terminates in the upper part of the kiosk bay, offering for a moment the best lakeside view of all.

Marsh uses a wide range of materials and finishes, making the building increasingly chameleon-like, and accepting the current practicality that things are mostly clad and generally you cannot see the naked substance. Limestone along the colonnade including the claddings of the columns -- and pre-patinated copper roofs -- intentionally invoke the architecture of the inter-war years. Black granite differentiates the theatre. The most intensively detailed parts are around the cafe, and especially the kiosk with its curved glass panels and boat-like timber. The way that steel columns are given negative capitals, and ceiling fields are differentiated shows the trouble taken over what is essentially an economical building. All in all, the Lawrence Pavilion is a heroic attempt to respond to an unusually large range of disparate demands, both socially and contextually. At first it looks rather eclectic, but when you understand the reasons for the tensions between its parts, they seem rather necessary, and the more y ou examine it in detail the more there is to find.

Architect

Marsh: Grochowski, Nottingham

Project team

Julian Marsh, Mike Reade, Martin Noutch

Photographs

Peter Blundell Jones