Mathematical paradoxes: big, high-powered academic centre lands in west Cambridge suburb with scale and energy credentials.

Mathematical academics work in many different ways: sometimes intensely privately; at others in lectures and colloquia, so the new Cambridge University Centre for Mathematical Sciences (1) had to provide a complex lattice of spaces, ranging from almost hermetic cells to formal theatres, and to spaces in which people can meet casually and chat.

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The other main determinant of the Centre's design was its site and its neighbours. West Cambridge is an area of grand villas set in their own grounds. It was largely built in the second part of the nineteenth century when the university's dons were allowed to marry for the first time. They built a marvellously diverse collection of houses that offers an unrivalled compendium of upper-middle class domestic styles that starts with Queen Anne revival, goes through Arts and Crafts and ends with the Wrenaissance. Different though the styles are, the houses have scale in common, and when the idea of developing a seven acre field in the middle of the suburb as a new faculty was launched in the early '90s, people who owned surrounding properties were (rightly) vociferous in demanding that the mathematics centre should not be overwhelming, and that it should respond sympathetically to its location. It has.

Cullinan's were appointed as architects in 1992, but fundraising, and distillation of the requirements of clients, planners and neighbours meant that the first phase of the Centre could not be started until 1998; the last phase was completed earlier this year. In essence, the plan consists of seven pavilions linked by a common centre. As well, there is a gatehouse and the circular Betty and Gordon Moore Science and Technology Library--the Centre is almost entirely funded by private donations, mostly from former students (reading maths at Cambridge seems to lead to a lucrative later life). Everything, including the perimeter car parking bays, is subtly brought together by Livingston Eyre's landscaping that knits into the bosky suburban setting.

The envelope of the pavilions was generated by those of the surrounding villas. Their separation as individual blocks was partly determined by a planning notion that the street edges should be maintained visually, while preserving views across the site and some notion of a parkland setting, for, of course, the field had seemed to be a park in the middle of the suburb. Breaking down the whole into discrete parts allowed the Centre to be built in phases to relate to the flow of funding (which turned out to be far faster than anticipated: the target was to collect funds over 20 years; it was achieved in 10).

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Just as important in determining the pavilion parti was the need to give scholar's cells a degree of individuality. Traditional Cambridge colleges, modelled on monastic cloisters, consist of courts surrounded by walls of individual rooms. The mathematical centre (which unlike the colleges is not residential) takes and subverts the archetype by surrounding the central space with independent blocks. Cells in each pavilion offer a range of divergent experiences and views, rather than the focused ones of the rooms surrounding the courts of the colleges. So the standard university 13.5 sq m office has a good deal of variation, with attic rooms, corner ones, and ones overlooking the central space or the green riches of the surrounding nineteenth-century context. Six of the pavilions are, in effect, little scholastic towers made round the Cambridge tradition of the common academic stair (reputedly the source of innumerable serendipitous notions and relationships). Nowadays, each stair has been complemented with a lift, but the vertical circulation drums, partly toplit and enclosed by glass brick walls are luminous, far more than simple vertical circulation shafts. The seventh pavilion is double, and it terminates the complex to the west, containing in the middle the main lecture theatre in which speakers cover vast blackboards with (to the lay visitor) utterly incomprehensible hieroglyphics.

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Each pavilion has a ground floor common room, where people can gather in groups or sit quietly chatting or reading journals. Four of the common rooms open into the main space of the Centre. This is a long low cave: a cafeteria, mess and the focus of the whole organization. Very slender and elegant precast concrete arches span the space to bear (2) on buttresses so massive that they provide alcoves off the big central space, the social heart of the academic community. The fundamentally hangar-like volume is made genial, rather cheerful, with a slatted timber ceiling and a line of daylight that is brought down to the middle of the space through strips of glass blocks set in the apex of the curve.

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Above, the glass blocks are the pavement of an inclined axial path that divides the curving grass-covered roof of the common room, over which look many of the studies in the surrounding towers. At the top of the gentle ramp, the towers cease to be tall, but become part of a general amiable formal conversation round the central green. When I was there on a sunny summer day, the court was already being used by students relaxing, studying and chatting: it works as it was intended to. From the highest part of the green, it is easy to see into the surrounding rooms, and to understand the workings of the pavilions. Each of them is made of beautifully laid rough solid buff Cambridge-like brick with very precise precast concrete lintels and strings. Each is topped by an elaborate zinc roof with wide overhangs intended to reduce insolation. On top of each pyramid is a lantern that both brings light to the central stair of the pavilion and acts as a climate control mechanism.

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Cullinan has experimented with climate control in lantern devices before, notably in the library for St John's College in the same university (AR April 1994). In essence, each lantern is a thermal chimney that allows every room in its pavilion to be naturally ventilated. The lanterns breathe with automatic systems for opening and closing vents. In the middle are stainless-steel flues that remove foul air from the lavatories and ventilate boilers and the fluid dynamics laboratory. With the thermal flywheel effect of the massive masonry walls and the recessed windows, the chimneys ensure that running costs (measured after occupation) are forty per cent lower than those of buildings of similar type and use. Soil for the grass over the common room adds to the thermal inertia of the whole.

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Leaving the green and going down out through the gatehouse, you turn back and look at the grey zinc roofs of what at first evokes a strange notion of the Grand Fleet with two squadrons of Dreadnoughts sailing in line astern to make a pincer movement on the Kriegsmarine. And you think again and remember the Salk, Louis Kahn's calm place in its idyllic desert-scented landscape that so peacefully overlooks the Pacific at La Jolla. The Centre for Mathematical Sciences has just as calm a heart, though it looks out onto the completely different verdant, moist gentle scene of west Cambridge. Yet at the same time, it almost aggressively evokes the awesome international power of a great academic institution. P.D.

Architect

Edward Cullinan Architects, London

Principal design team members

Dinah Bornat, Carol Costello, Ted Cullinan, Alison Farwell, Peter Inglis, Michael Kohn, Roddy Langmuir, Wen Quek, James Roach, Kristina Roszynski, Steven Western, Johnny Winter

Structural engineer

Buro Happold

Services engineer

Roger Preston & Partners

Landscape architect

Livingston Eyre Associates

Photographs

Peter MacKinven. VIEW

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CENTRE FOR MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES, CAMBRIDGE, UK

ARCHITECT

EDWARD CULLINAN ARCHITECTS

(1) The Centre houses the University Faculty of Mathematics, which is divided into two departments: Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences.

(2) Through clearly articulated stainless-steel pin joints.