THE POSTWAR UNIVERSITY, UTOPIANIST CAMPUS AND COLLEGE.

By Stefan Muthesius. London: Yale University 

Press. 2000. [pound]35

UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

By Brian Edwards. London: Span Press. 2000. [pound]60

Two books on university design cause Andrew Derbyshire, chief architect of York University, England to reflect on a heroic period when architecture seemed to directly influence life.

Stefan Muthesius has written one of the most exasperating books ever, and yet it taught me a lot about a subject I thought I knew well.

I started, as I suppose every reviewer should, at the beginning and found myself ploughing through a discussion of the relative meanings of utopian as opposed to utopianist. I would normally have skipped from there on, looked at the pictures, read the bits of the text that caught my eye and put the book on the shelf for reference -- because it's pretty encyclopaedic on the subject and carries an excellent bibliography. But I wanted to get on to the author's treatment of the seven English New Universities of the '60s to see what an independent observer would make of what I and my colleagues had been up to in those heady days.

So I stuck to the task and having left the semantics behind found a fascinating description of university development in pre-war United States. I had thought when we were designing the development plan for York that we were breaking new ground. I hadn't realized that we were (or at any rate I was) unconsciously reflecting not only the growing concern in the States to make student well-being the central focus of university education, but also the precedent of the liberal arts college in breaking down boundaries between subjects and insisting on student residence as an essential prerequisite of university life.

Muthesius shows in a series of brilliant vignettes that these were more or less formative concerns for the other six as well. What he writes about York corresponds uncannily with my memory of what actually happened and includes anecdotal material which I have not seen written down anywhere else. Assuming that this is equally true of his accounts of the rest, this part of the book must be essential reading for anyone who was involved at the time or who's interested in the interactions between people that make buildings happen.

Freedom

Two things are worth noting. One is that these seven new universities were designed by a small number of people who had a lot of freedom to do what they thought was right. In particular the relationship between the Vice-Chancellor and the architect was crucial -- close and fruitful in the case of Sussex, York, Essex, East Anglia and Lancaster; fraught in the case of Kent (Bill Holford resigned after three years complaining that the autocratic Templeman hadn't given him adequate instructions), and uneasy at Warwick where early design intentions were confused by the grandiose ambitions of the Coventry city architect who had to give way to YRM who were then replaced by Gabby Epstein from Lancaster. Nevertheless Warwick has always been high in university rankings while Kent has struggled. What lessons do we learn from that?

The second is that these close relationships have led Muthesius to the conclusion that architects had complete control of the brief and the ensuing design. This was not true at York where there was a genuine partnership led firmly by the academics which produced a brief based on a large number of difficult questions which the founding fathers courageously answered. I believe this was also true of Lancaster and Essex. I am startled to learn, however, that Basil Spence at Sussex didn't believe in development plans and Lasdun at East Anglia had no brief and didn't want one.

These unusual circumstances of independent autonomy and financial security led to a high degree of brave experimentation and a wide range of different academic and social aspirations which generated a corresponding variety of different design solutions. Lancaster, Kent and York were based on multi-functional colleges which integrated academic, leisure and residential uses while Sussex, East Anglia and Essex separated out academic functions from residence. Lancaster, East Anglia and Essex opted for high density urban concentrations in parkland; York, Kent and Sussex deployed linked building units in a low density landscape. Muthesius writes off Warwick, the most orthodox of the seven, rather disparagingly as 'Last International Modern' and concludes 'All in all, Warwick's importance in the context of the unified plans of the Seven New Universities was chiefly one of contrast'.

At York we saw such diversity as a rich field for research into the relationship between built form and academic and social outcomes which would help to establish greater certainty for the clients and architects of future universities. As Muthesius reports, our efforts to promote this failed and the unique opportunity was lost. Even at York it was 20 years before a systematic review of the performance of the development plan was undertaken through surveys of student opinion, even though the idea had been theoretically endorsed at the beginning. Young institutions fear the consequences of discovering failure more strongly than the well established.

Failure, or at least a symptom of it, was however thrust in our faces by the student demonstrations of the late 1960s. Muthesius tells us 'In 1977 there were rumours of a sizeable, unofficial list of candidates for closure ... It seemed that the "troubles" involved chiefly the most modern institutions, especially the New Universities, with the case of Essex being the most severe ... Only the London School of Economics suffered more. Next in severity came Warwick and East Anglia ... while Sussex experienced fewer problems and the others remained relatively quiet'.

There was no attempt to relate this experience to the architecture of the seven in any systematic way and Muthesius has to fall back on anecdote -- to which I can add my penn'orth. Attempting to explain the relative tranquillity at York an academic told me, 'However angry you get indoors it's very difficult to keep it up when you go outside to a world of trees, grass, water and ducks'. But this is no substitute for statistics.

Megalomania 

Muthesius follows the story of the English Seven with an eye-opening tour of university building which had been going on in North America and Europe at the same time. We are confronted by amazing scenes of megalomaniac structures of staggering size and monotonous brutality, the social consequences of which don't bear contemplation. Once again the exasperating Muthesius tantalizes us with hints of demolitions, student riots and great fallings out.

He concludes his case studies, however, on a more hopeful note with a description of the design for an extension of the Freic Universitat Berlin by Candiis, Josic and Woods. This was a rectilinear network of spaces and connections contained in a l4ha (34 acre) rectangle in which absolutely anything could happen. It was generally only two storeys high with the occasional basement, had no major entrance and no centre, focus or keynote buildings. It was the apotheosis of indeterminacy promising great flexibility and giving the users the freedom to be their own architects. I wished when I first saw it that we had been so bold at York. The theme was picked up by extensions of the Phillips Universitat at Marburg an der Lahn and the Loughborough University of Technology, both of which predicated the use of lightweight prefabricated building components exploiting the standard structural grid as we had done at York. Because of this philosophical echo I have always been curious to know how these three experiments have worked out in practice, but once again Muthesius is obscure.

The book ends as it began, with a discourse on semantics -- this time on the dialectic of 'Utopia or Instrumentalism?' which I translate as Idealism v Materialism -- the tightrope on which every architect must balance. Muthesius concludes 'How then do the utopianist efforts of the 1960s look today? One thing we can say is that they did not turn into dystopia. That was probably because the founders and designers did not want actual utopias; in their view, they combined as much utopia as possible with as much instrumentalism as necessary'. Precisely; but why then were they all so different and have they, in spite of that achieved the same results? A glance at the league tables, for what they're worth, reveals that this is by no means the case and we come back to my old concern about the need to find the connection between design causes and performance effects. With this in mind I turned to Brian Edwards for help. In vain; I had hoped that he would at least bring us up-to-date news of the Seven. How are the ide als of their founders standing up to economic stringency and the modern student way of life 40 years on? Is it true that York is to demolish one of its colleges and that Kent has abandoned them altogether? Have most of them handed over architectural patronage to the builders in the quest for cheap capital to put up student residence?

Alas these questions are not on Edwards' agenda at all. His book is really a guide to the design of universities divided into two parts, one on the campus and the other on typical buildings with checklists and case studies. He also deals with issues which have emerged since the '70s when Muthesius effectively switches off. These have to do with unpleasant but essential problems of security, crime prevention and how to attract capital with the right architectural image. 'Of all the strands of current architecture, high tech seems most appropriate to a progressive university' is one of his more spine-chilling remarks in this context.

Externality 

Edwards makes a useful distinction between 'master plans' which describe the actual form of buildings, and 'development frameworks' which do not. We have all faced the dilemma of trying to describe to the stakeholders what the place is going to look like 10 or more years away while at the same time retaining the flexibility to respond to the uncertainties of growth and change, and he gives helpful advice. Another subject which was not at the front of our minds in the '60s is sustainability and the book demonstrates the impact environmental criteria should have on university design. One of his frequently quoted examples is unfortunately a building which has given its owners and users a lot of trouble.

Which brings me back to my hobby-horse. Both these authors dwell too much for my taste on the externalities of architecture and fail to ask rigorously whether all these ingenious and innovative plans and buildings have in fact done what their authors promised and delivered the goods in use? Muthesius refers to modest surveys of student opinion and keeps hinting at consequences, but it seems as though his perception of the historian's role denies him what he might regard as the luxury of value judgement. Edwards on the other hand seems completely oblivious to the need for feedback.

I have bored my friends for years by asserting that what's holding back the construction industry in Britain is a kind of institutional amnesia. Unlike science, architecture has so far lacked the tradition of systematic enquiry into the consequences of innovation and hypothesis. But now the sleeping giant stirs. The Confederation of Construction Clients has just been awarded a sizable grant by the Government for a research project which is designed to deliver to clients a ready tool for the evaluation of building performance in use.

It is the clients who pay the piper who are in the best position to call the tune so this may be the breakthrough which can lead in the long run to a profound change in the culture of the industry. While hooks like these, with their meticulous histories and taxonomies of plan and building type will provide a valuable platform for this kind of research, I hope that in the long run it will be customary to judge architecture by its performance and not its looks alone.