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Yesterday's vision
Disgusting,"says Geoffrey, sitting on a bench facing the Edward Boyle library at the University of Leeds. "It's uncomfortable, the heating's useless and the ergonomics are rubbish." His friend Dacre is feeling more generous. "It's all right really, but it needs to be revamped."
Elsewhere, the 1960s' campus, of which the Edward Boyle library is a part, elicits a more positive response.
Felicity is having lunch on the grass: "I really like it. It's different. The architecture's hard, but it's quite peaceful. I like the pond in front of the Roger Stevens building and the reflections on the concrete inside."
Leeds University's 1960s' campus is something of a lost world so far as the ordinary citizen is concerned.
Cut off from the city centre by the Leeds Infirmary and from Woodhouse Lane by the better-known Parkinson Building, few residents of Leeds venture there.
Even within the university it feels apart. Some students spend virtually all their time there (Stacey likens the experience to being trapped in the film Labyrinth); others practically none.
"I never really go down there," Hatty tells me, "but I like it when I do.".
"The buildings inspire strong feelings," says Robert Sladdin, director of estates for the university. It's not difficult to see why. Sixties architecture has long been out of fashion.
Penelope Curtis, curator of the Henry Moore Institute, wants to persuade us that it's time take another look. The institute has just opened its latest exhibition, The New Monumentality, examining post-war architecture and its appeal for contemporary artists. "I've wanted to work with this group of artists for a while," says Penelope. "They share a fascination with Sixties architecture. But when I approached them to make work in Leeds they asked me why? And then one day, when I was walking through the university, I realised that this was why, these extraordinary buildings."
Leeds University has three distinct campuses. The first dates from the 1870s and was designed by the architect of the Natural History Museum, Alfred Waterhouse. The second, begun in 1927, includes the neo-classical buildings on Woodhouse Lane. The third, the Sixties campus, took almost 15 years to build and was huge, ambitious and controversial.
Its construction involved clearing streets of Victorian terracing and even submerging the ring road.
Historian Janet Douglas arrived at the university in 1960, and remembers her low opinion of its architecture. "I thought the Waterhouse buildings were terrible – old-fashioned and gloomy."
The campus was split in two by University Road, a major bus route, and Janet wasn't over-impressed by the university's most recent addition, the Rupert Beckett Theatre.
But by then, Leeds University had a masterplan. It had become clear by the late 1950s that the country's university sector was going to expand rapidly and that the buildings at Leeds were inadequate. The university's long-time architect was retiring and radical change demanded a radical solution. A search began for the right architect.
Joe Chamberlin, its choice in 1958, was one of a group of young architects who became known as the Brutalists. Inspired by the French architect Le Corbusier, they were committed to creating high density, planned "total environments", or, as Le Corbusier put it "machines for living in".
Together with his partners, Geoffry Powell and Christoph Bonn (their firm was known as CPB), Chamberlin was already working on the complex which was to become the Barbican in London.
Chamberlin began by analysing current usage, almost like a town-planner. He collected statistics, created complex diagrams and compiled reports. The result was an extraordinary document, the University of Leeds Development Plan, published in 1960.
CPB described their aim as to bring together "buildings and related elements to make places with strong identities of their own". Chamberlin proposed a number of new monumental buildings – a senior common room, a physical education centre, a block of lecture theatres, an art gallery and an undergraduate library – which would be held together by a spine of repetitive service buildings, housing offices, laboratories, and workshops.
This spine was to be built on a grid system, and was intended to be almost infinitely expandable. By designing in this way, CPB believed they had solved the problem facing all university architects – flexibility. Departments could expand, contract, up-sticks and move to another part of the campus. And when the university reached full capacity, it could build again using the same design.
The complex was to be linked by a horizontal indoor street which would also connect the new campus to the older buildings up the hill. The street would keep members of the university dry during Leeds's wet winters and would also deal with the problem of the steep slope on which the university sits.
The plan was a work of art in its own right, and created huge excitement. The Yorkshire Post praised its "spacious dignity and quiet beauty"; the Architects Journal saw it as "a new order ... a stand against the surrounding chaos of Leeds".
Chamberlin, it seemed, had not only solved Leeds's problems, he had also set a new standard for university architecture.
But the plan soon ran up against reality. Chamberlin had assumed a population of 7,200 students. Four years later 20,000 were predicted. Moreover, the University Grants Committee (UGC) had allocated a niggardly 96 shillings per student. Chamberlin was forced to cut and rationalise, revise and refine.
His frustration spilled out into furious letters which prompted one academic to sneer "psychiatric treatment seems advisable". Finally, in 1973, the oil crisis prompted the UGC to cut its support by 90 per cent. Finally Chamberlin's plan was sunk by the very thing that had made it possible, changes in taste. The tide was turning against modernism. The Yorkshire Post now dismissed modern buildings as "ephemera" and "glass-walled aquaria", and asked was it right to obliterate "large areas of pleasant architecture" in order to make way for them.
The architecture critic, Ken Powell, arrived in Leeds in the early 1970s and remembers having an "entirely positive" reaction to the buildings. It was clear, however, that the plan would never be fully realised. "The feeling had turned against comprehensive schemes such as this, and much of the campus was about to became a conservation area." The Edward Boyle library was finished in 1975, the year that Joe Chamberlin died.
Even unfinished, however, Ken Powell argues the Sixties' campus represents a crucial moment in the history of Leeds.
"It was a period of confidence and renewal. You have to remember, how dark and gloomy post-war Leeds remained, well into the 1950s." But, the scheme had failed in one of Chamberlin's most important aims – to connect the university into the city. Cut off behind the massive Infirmary, its scale and sophistication remains almost a secret.
Ken Powell is convinced it is time to list the campus. Penelope Curtis agrees. Both are disturbed by the recent demolition of a hall of residence behind the senior common room. The Chamberlin campus, they say, is vulnerable to the university's pressing needs, and they worry that it could be dismantled piecemeal.
Listing the campus needn't stop change, says Elain Harwood of English Heritage. But change would have to be scrutinised and managed. And listing would also draw attention to this remarkable utopian complex, so close to the city centre. For, as the exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute suggests, attitudes are changing once more. "I find that a lot of people in their twenties really admire 1960s' culture, including its art and design," says Elain. "It's what is sometimes known as the Austin Powers effect".
Janet Douglas is delighted about the exhibition. "We need to encourage people to look again, to help people see what a remarkable complex this is."
But above all, Janet, as a historian, is haunted by the fate of Quarry Hill, the internationally-famous housing scheme, built in the 1930s and demolished in the 1970s. "Quarry Hill was the best known building in Leeds. But the local authority didn't maintain it and it became a white elephant. Once it had gone, it was gone, and just think what it could have been now."
The New Monumentality: Gerard Byrne, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Dorit Margreiter – Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, until August 30. Admission is free.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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