Features

By Hugh Pearman

A golden early autumn day at Sussex University. It’s Freshers’ Week and this year’s intake is settling in, making friends, signing up to this society and that. The same scene is being repeated across the country. But as a place Sussex, more than most of the nine pioneering new university campuses of the early 1960s, finds itself in a bit of a fix.

Its distinctive original downland campus by Sir Basil Spence, Bonnington & Collins, is rightly acclaimed. Several of its buildings are listed – including one, the gateway Falmer House, at grade I. But teaching methods and some building uses have changed, many of the earlier buildings are showing their age, and student numbers have vastly increased. So the Sussex campus – which wants to break into the top 12 of British universities – needs to expand and selectively rebuild. This is not easy.

The very thing that sets Sussex apart res­tricts its room for manoeuvre – its pastoral setting in a valley of the South Downs at Falmer, between Brighton and Lewes. Planners do not want to blur the distinction between the two places, especially as lots more building is taking place just opposite, in the newer campus of the University of Brighton. Not for nothing is Sussex’s student newspaper known as The Badger, since wildlife presses in all round its woodland margins, landscaped originally by Dame Sylvia Crowe. So there is a limit to how much building is allowed, a limit that will be even more rigorously enforced if the proposed South Downs National Park comes into being.

Spence’s original masterplan and designs, much influenced by late Le Corbusier and Ancient Rome, date back to 1959, which means the university as a concept is nearly 50 years old. His buildings appeared between 1961 and 1972, but many other hands have been at work there since. Spence designed no student accommodation – the optimistic assumption was that students would be out-of-season residents of Brighton’s guest houses. This omission was put right in successive waves of housing, at first in the manner of Spence but gradually departing decisively from his aesthetic.

The mid-1970s East Slope terraces by Maguire and Murray, for instance, are intrusive, at odds with Spence’s careful groupings, and are earmarked for replacement. Those, however, are formally preferable to some of the folksier later contributions by others, which become increasingly suburban the further up the valley you go. It’s sad that the university’s upland boundary – very prominent viewed from the Downs above – is so ill-considered, so ugly as a result of these piecemeal additions.

Sussex’s present-day masterplanner, architects ADP, thus had a tricky task to perform when they looked at the university’s wish-list. They found themselves, says partner in charge Roger FitzGerald, drawing up both an expansion masterplan and a separate conservation plan – since, somewhat to his surprise and despite the listed status of the original campus, no such document existed. His conservation plan categorises the significance of the buildings on a scale ranging from ‘exceptional’ through ‘neutral’ to ‘detracts’. The later housing falls plumb into the ‘detracts’ category.

Any visit to the campus thus becomes something of a reassessment. How is Spence holding up? Pretty well from an aesthetic point of view – these buildings have outlived the vagaries of fashion. Spence was of course regarded as insufficiently modern by the modernists. He always had that whiff of Lutyens-derived monumentality about him, for all the references here to Corb’s Maisons Jaoul, and the total absence of anything approaching ornament. There is a Piranesian quality to this campus. Set against that, the soft red brickwork and white window-frames were a nod to the Sussex vernacular, while the generally low-slung nature of the buildings was a deliberate policy not to impinge on the skyline. Such sensitivity was not usually the Spence way.

The planning of the campus has its quirks, such as the remarkable prominence, close to the centre of the site and just off-axis, of the boilerhouse – where you might expect something like a senate house in a more traditional university. The separation of cars and pedestrians is not quite sufficient – in FitzGerald’s new masterplan, vehicle routes and parking are pushed more decisively to the eastern edge. Maintenance of the original buildings is an ongoing headache. And in the grade-I-listed Falmer House – a slightly sinister, perforated courtyard composition, initially multi-use, now occupied by the student union – health and safety has reared its head. Spence’s courtyard ‘moat’ of shallow sheets of water was kept drained during Freshers’ Week lest students fall into it. Good grief – aren’t students programmed to dunk each other cheerfully in water?

There is sadness here too. One of the Spence practice’s most successful works, the theatre/art gallery of the 1969, grade-II*-listed Gardner Centre, stands empty and unused, victim of arts funding cuts. It also has outdated services and does not meet today’s accessibility standards. It will take several millions to get it back into use. Yet, with its complex broken circular geometry, it anticipates the churches and houses of Mario Botta and is perhaps the most timeless structure on the site. Performers and audiences loved its intimacy and warm acoustics. Slightly aloof from the main campus yet participating in the stately dance of Spence’s buildings, it deserves to be rescued, and soon.

What, though, of today’s interventions? The first sign of ADP’s intentions for what is a very ambitious expansion, worth some £240m over up to 20 years, is now apparent: the three ranges of new student residences known collectively as Swan­borough, placed close to the heart of the complex on a former car park. New parking has been sinuously introduced to the hillside behind while the buildings themselves are cut into the rising ground. These mark a welcome return to Spence’s palette of materials – brick with exposed concrete details and (so modish right now) panels of coloured glass, a cue taken from another circular building of Spence’s, the university’s chapel/meeting house.

Remedial work has been necessary on these new blocks – the builder had to be called back after completion to put right incorrectly fitted cavity trays and vertical dpcs, involving rescaffolding the blocks and opening up the outer leaf. Inevitably, the redbrick facades now have a patchwork quality, much at odds with the generally uniform (if sometimes stained) quality of brickwork from the Spence era. In the face of this, the university’s estates and facilities director David Kirkwood is remarkably phlegmatic: the problem is sorted, he says, and the mortar will have to be hand-tinted to match the original. Inside, the 14m2 rooms are relatively generous, while ADP has also given thought to the outdoor spaces, creating large grassed courtyards between the blocks, slightly raised to make informal seating around the edges. Kirkwood refers to the need for ‘background buildings’ to serve the overall feel of the campus. The Swanborough blocks and courts serve this function admirably.

This is just the start of a programme that will continue with a new ADP teaching building with lecture theatres and seminar rooms, next to Spence’s boilerhouse, fronted by a green courtyard. Later will come more residences higher up the valley, a new students’ union, larger lecture theatres suitable for today’s larger teaching groups – the overall accommodation at the university will increase by close to 30% by the time the masterplan is complete, most of it on the eastern side of the site. Upon which, the site will be full, and any further expansion will need a second campus. All the work is to be done by a roster of framework-agreement architects including ADP, Pascall + Watson, Sheppard Robson and Chichester-based HNW. Conspicuously absent is the successor to Spence’s practice, the John S Bonnington Partnership, which sounds a little wistful about it when I give them a call.

Well, that’s university life – your buildings leave home, so to speak. My discussion with the latest generation at Sussex has convinced me that the original intentions of Spence, Bonnington & Collins are being treated with more respect than they have been for years. If only they could magic away all the suburban additions of the past two decades. But there’s a more urgent need: to put together a rescue package for the Gardner Centre. Its 40th anniversary is next year. There is a valuable piece of modern heritage at stake.