Architecture: On from Antiquity

Therefore your Halls, your ancient Colleges,

Your portals statued with old kings and queens . . .

Shall not avail you when the Day-beam sports

New-risen o’er awaken’d Albion . . .

—Tennyson on Cambridge

As the oldest universities in the English-speaking world, Oxford and Cambridge are architectural amalgams of virtually every style from 13th century Romanesque through Gothic and Tudor to Victorian. Somehow all the styles blend in a nobly ancient mix of ornate walls, curlicued towers, spires, domes and gables, archways, turrets, gargoyles and waterspouts. The atmosphere is that of a contemplative sanctuary, the world where Wordsworth recorded “Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven.” Gowned scholars still mount gloomy stair wells to their dark, dank digs.

Now, in new colleges rising at each university, Oxbridge has cut the old school ties. The educational tradition remains the same: a contained community of students and dons. But gone are the gates, and instead of belfried battlements and prisonlike mullions, there is geometric functionalism and airy spaciousness.

Escape with a Dane. The more avant-garde is $7,700,000 St. Catherine’s College at Oxford, which accepted its first students two years ago although it is still being completed. The college was designed by Danish Architect Arne Jacobsen, 62, creator of Copenhagen’s glass-packaged Royal Hotel, who believes that “economy plus function equals style.” St. Catherine’s master, Historian Alan Bullock, wanted someone who would not be affected by Oxford’s “almost suffocating feeling of being unable to escape from the past.” Jacobsen’s escape could hardly be more complete.

Set in a meadow by the River Cherwell, St. Catherine’s low, flat roofs (maximum height: 30 ft.) blend with, rather than dominate, a horizon defined by trees (see opposite page). Only the high, spare bell tower—two planes joined by minimal struts—provides collegiate symbolism. Inside the grounds the pattern is yellow-beige brick (Jacobsen had several walls knocked down and laid again), sweeps of floor-to-ceiling glass and marble-smooth concrete beams—all interspersed with gardens, courts and a reflecting pool. The quadrangle is a rond-point of greensward offering a single, artfully off-centered tree.

Though it measures only 400 ft. by 800 ft., the campus has no feeling of being crowded. Yet it is a model of compact efficiency. Arrivals are greeted by a circular bicycle park with partially glassed roof. Jacobsen, who also dabbles in interiors, designed everything from the college silverware and china to its door handles. The high table is lighted with rows of soft Jacobsen lamps. Rooms feature a variant of Jacobsen’s famed, womblike “egg chair” (“You want to sit back protected”).

Ruddy English. Churchill College at Cambridge, named for Sir Winston, is the work of British Architect Richard Sheppard, and the difference of nationalities shows (see overleaf). Sheppard’s brick is ruddier, his concrete—cast in softwood forms—rustically textured. And there is less glass.

Churchill is very much, as its master, Nuclear Physicist Sir John Cockcroft, specified, an institution “for its own time and place.” The campus landmark is a vaulted concrete roof that soars over the dining hall. Churchill’s modernistic blocks and grass courtyards are sprinkled with flower boxes and brick planters, and so arranged as to provide pleasingly shifting views of planes, light and shadow.

To some, Jacobsen’s Scandinavian-modern tableau is out of place in Oxfordshire. The London Sunday Times noted wryly that St. Catherine’s “dining hall at night has a suggestion of the Troll King’s Palace in Peer Gynt.” Against such uncompromising foreignness and severity, Churchill may well be the greater esthetic work—managing honest charm and beauty without contrived tension. But in their functional purposes, both designs are being equally well received. Above all, they are of the present with a thrust toward the future; the atmosphere suggests strongly that the student is there to function. And the new horizons are spreading. Oxford’s Brasenose has erected an undergraduate residence hall that is almost Japanese in its modernity, and at St. Anne’s, an Oxford women’s college, a new dormitory scheme reflects the ultramodern “chocolate-bar esthetic” rooms raised on the facade like the squares of a Cadbury’s.