Leader

By Hugh Pearman

Basil Spence started to design Sussex University nearly 50 years ago – while he was RIBA President, incidentally, and still finishing off Coventry Cathedral. Several of his buildings at Sussex are now listed and one, the masterly Gardner Centre, is closed and in need of rescue. But Sussex now has a £240m expansion masterplan under way. This is not untypical across the higher-education sector, though it is more ambitious than most. Partly this is because of the huge increase in student numbers in recent years, which requires larger spaces for teaching as well as a huge programme of new student housing.

In the rush, too many universities have taken the easy option of letting private developers handle their building programmes for them, particularly the residential work. The result is a loss of identity, as formulaic blocks mushroom all over the country. But some – like Sussex and Lancaster – are revisiting their original designs and making huge efforts to get back to their clarity of vision.

Attracting students and staff is a highly competitive business, which explains why some universities fancy a bit of icon-architecture. Hence Make’s adventurous contributions at Nottingham. Such buildings shout and wave, but are in danger of looking more than faintly ridiculous. In the long term, will they be a match for Spence, let alone Paul Rudolph’s now-restored architecture school at Yale?

One man who knows all about this is Rick Mather, whom we profile on page 26. Mather’s practice has quietly produced some of the best new university buildings of recent years, from Oxford to Liverpool. Anyone designing for higher education can learn much from him about the virtues of restrained modernism.