Organ Pipe-clad Concrete and Lost Students

Chamberlin Powell and Bon in Leeds

For Part 1 of this blog, please click here: Chamberlin, Powell and Bon in London

Thanks to those of you who met me at the Barbican in my last blog. We are now in West Yorkshire at the University of Leeds, taking a look at the work that Chamberlin, Powell and Bon (CPB) undertook on the campus in the 60s, as Master Planners for the big post-war campus project. The challenge for the university and CPB at this time was manifold and included such problems as creating a holistic and cohesive campus, offering a look and feel that would signify the vision of a new university, and to do this within the scope and limitations set by both the university and the city itself. The two plans they produced at the early stages of the project are not only fascinating to read, but works of art in their own right (see below).

The photos shown in this blog are of the Roger Stevens Lecture Theatre (colloquially known simply as 'Roger Stevens'). People's views on the aesthetics of the building (students and academics alike) are polarised. However, I think many feel that way about Brutalist architecture generally. The organ-pipe clad concrete-formed Roger Stevens is a prime example of Modernist sixties architecture at its best. Recognised as a Grade II listed building in 2010, its existence has since become justified, following the period in the 70s and 80s when people began to lose faith in the Modernist project, and councils started to pull down their public housing projects (see information and photos on the Pruitt-Igoe, or watch Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass's superb film Koyaanisqatsi to see its demise).

The original design for the Roger Stevens was very different from the final lecture theatre, as can be seen in the architecture's mock-up below:

The final Roger Stevens is woven into the campus via raised walkway access (as above) which seamlessly takes you from the higher ground further up the hill, directly into the building. However, once inside things begin to get complicated. Most people find it hard to negotiate because of multiple staircases and what seems like an unintuitive layout. I have been at the university since 2005 and always have a problem finding the actual lecture theatre I am looking for.

One of the more intriguing and lesser known facts about the Roger Stevens, though, is that a broadcasting studio was built in the basement. I didn't know about it till 2012 when an exhibition was held there: Celine Condorelli's 'Additionals'. I went to the private viewing and include some of the photos I took of the event below:

In the last blog I mentioned how little information there was on CPB, especially by themselves, however I did come across an article by Chamberlin in The University of Leeds Review (May 1969) entitled 'The Evolution and Realization of the University Development Plan' and include a quote from that article here:

A university should have a sense of wholeness which is not fostered by segregated planning. [...] An early task in evolving a Development Plan was to establish valid principles of design calculated to meet the ascertainable need of the University and to invent a vocabulary of design which could be relied on to meet a whole variety of situations and problems.

In the conclusion of Elain Harwood's chapter on the University of Leeds in the RIBA commissioned book, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, she says of their work at Leeds:

That the Leeds plan as originally envisaged by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon was never fully realised became inevitable following the imposition of financial restraints. Building struggled on through the 1970s, although after 1973 funding was cut by 90 per cent. Powell recalled that 'the government eventually discovered that it had briefly over-expanded higher education.' Money ran out, and a new generation moved in who wanted change.

You can watch a film I made based on my own response to the sixties precinct area of the university campus, including the area around the Roger Stevens. Here is part of the abstract for the film by way of explanation. The link to the film is below it: "This 3 minute film is an acoustic psychogeographical response to the area called the precinct and features two of the most impressive buildings of this era."

Film: The Sound of the Sixties: Chamberlin, Powell and Bon

Links:
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon: Space Age or Quasi-Totalitarianism?
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon: Does the old campus make sense in the present?
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon: The Return of the Repressed

Chamberlin, Powell and Bon: Space Age or Quasi-Totalitarianism? - Part 1

Here are Owen Hatherley's comments on the Brutalist period at the University of Leeds from A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, plus some of my own commentary and images:

"Leeds University in particular can boast one of the most impressive attempts to design an inner-city campus as a total, coherent environment, albeit without the need for CCTV and gating - the complex of university buildings designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon between 1958 and 1968."

"Local rumour has it that this complex served as a set for the seventies science fiction series Blake's 7. This should come as no surprise. There is a divide in the perception of these buildings between the future they seem to suggest - a space-age society with egalitarian buildings make no reference to anything so prosaic as local materials, human scale or history, which some of us may find liberating, other unnerving - and the past they are most often seen to represent. That is, the other 1960s, not the now very familiar decade reminisced over by ageing soixante-huitards but the decade of a new landscape of towers and slabs, walkways and motorways, which is only very slowly starting to come back into favour after decades in which it was abhorred by many as an example of top-down quasi-totalitarianism, often better known for its transformation into film-set dystopias at the hand of Kubrick, Truffaut and Antonioni."

Chamberlin, Powell and Bon produced two bound plans for the university in the early 1960s (see above image). I don't think it would be a stretch to describe them now as objet d'art in their own right. These publications were distributed to university staff at the time. They aren't that easy to get hold of today. I have seen them for sale for as much as £100 online.

Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's vision was futuristic, as suggested by Hatherley, but it was also a contemporary response to the need for an expanded campus that could accommodate all the new postwar students. While it included the idea of students communing in Italian inspired piazzas, it also took a very rational and economic approach to the use of space. This even appeared in the form of 'joker' floors on the top of teaching buildings, which could easily be converted to teaching, administration or residential floors. Until recently some of these floors were still residential halls, as was the case in the Social Sciences building.

Whether you like, dislike or are indifferent to Brutalist architecture, much of it is now being listed, as are a number of these buildings at the University of Leeds, including the Roger Stevens Lecture Theatre shown in my first photo. So, its legacy is still really a work-in-progess. Elain Harwood, in her recent book on Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, when commenting on these university buildings says: "They have proved to be as adaptable as Chamberlin had promised, with the walls moved ad infinitum and service ducts coping with increased loadings. [...] The teaching buildings were listed in 2009, to ensure the conservation of their special qualities."

Apparently it is an urban myth that Blake's 7 was filmed there...

Other blogs in this series:
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon: Does the old campus make sense in the present? - Part 2
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon: The Return of the Repressed - Part 3