Architecture Today

January 2004

by Robert Maxwell

The architecture school marks the first stage in Rick Mather's master plan for the University of Lincoln. Critique by Robert Maxwell, emeritus professor of architecture at Princeton.

The day set to visit Lincoln turned out wet and miserable, and the university campus was looking like a prime example of the wetlands which it is. The rain didn't help the existing new campus buildings look like a new start. But in the middle stood an all-white building that stayed white through the rain and gave some hope of better weather to come: the new architecture school by Rick Mather Architects.

One could imagine the first visit to the site by an architect newly commissioned to provide a masterplan: the initial depression followed by the realisation that with so much glub there would be little difficulty in suggesting improvement. Mather's masterplan will use peripheral buildings to exclude the doleful view of edge-of-town shopping on the south, enlarging the site and its landscaped domain, providing new parking under trees, and focusing on a pool formed by cleaning up the balancing excavation which keeps the water table stable in relation to Brayford pool. In addition there will be a second Mather building, recently won in competition - the Lincoln Arts Centre - which will form a square together with the architecture school. This square will be a meeting place between town and gown. The masterplan also envisages new pedestrian links to the high street, which leads uphill through the town centre, and beyond, to Lincoln cathedral, the second largest gothic cathedral in Britain (after York). There is also talk of putting the railway which traverses the campus into a tunnel, which might be expensive as well as reducing the alertness required of students.

So we come to the architecture school itself: white outside and inside, therefore clearly modern. Not the new modernity of metal skin stretched over nondescript structure, but the traditional modern that seeks to provide functionality along with economy. The building will hardly bring the tourists to Lincoln as Gehry's Guggenheim does to Bilbao, but the campus, when complete, will very likely bring students to a congenial university. As a campus it will have some of the attractions of York but with improved closeness to the city as an amenity, a sense of urban enclosure set in the middle of countryside. And the architect has been conscious of the importance of the cathedral, and has worked to make its presence register on the daily life of the students below.

Clearly, this building has been designed with economy in mind. It cost £7.9 million for 7700 square metres and was built in just fourteen months; collaboration between the architects and Nigel Stevenson, the university's project manager, has been exemplary. More importantly, one can say that the search for economy has resulted in benefit. The school is a simple rectangular shed on a steel frame, with access off two parallel corridors. The space between the corridors has been expanded into an atrium that rises the full height of the building and pulls light down from above, but only at one end of the building. This atrium ends not in a glass roof, the cliche of our times, but in a series of skylights and clerestory windows. The light that comes down is not blinding, but filtered and reflected off the many white surfaces so that it has a magic quality of increasing the sense of spaciousness. And it does this without using up the budget. The space has been expanded by careful design, won by subjecting the brief to rigourous criticism.

The space of the entrance hall, for example, has been combined with the base of the atrium and the adjoining cafe to become the social centre of the building. It also provides the foyer to the two auditoria (one for 250, the other for 150) and the performance space at the west end of the building. The social spaces together form a sort of 'head' to the animal and this animates not only the building, but the plan also. The auditoria are part of a game that puts into play angles that break the conscious rectangularity of the whole, and give a character to the end of the building that faces the high street.

These angles derive in the first place from the shapes of the auditoria. This is extended by slightly revolving them in relation to the axes of the main accommodation, accentuated by the glazing at the entrance. These changes are quite slight in the project as a whole, but they galvanise the volumes and allow a constrained expression to come through.
The climax of this movement is seen in the view north past the east end of the building, looking to Lincoln cathedral beyond. This forms a window through which campus and cathedral are joined. In sunlight the shadow of the overhanging top floor comes to an exquisite point exactly on the south-east corner, which thus runs uninterrupted to the top of the building. It must have been a great satisfaction when the contractor achieved this alignment without any trouble or fuss.

This precision only shows because the form of the building is presented as an act of will by the architect, and is the reason for the decision to finish the building in white render. The sculptural effect of the volumes is emphasised by the organisation of the windows into long ribbons that allow the walls to cohere as masses and to appear as a unified statement.
The same unity of the uniformly white surfaces works inside to tie the atrium together into a single space. Because it has been won by careful planning at each level, it would be destroyed by any variety of finish. The only departure from the white is in the darker grey applied to the two bridges that link north and south corridors; these stand out, but they appear to be insertions that keep the two sides apart, so they also work for the unity of the design as a whole. A similar variation lies in the darker render applied to the plant room on the roof at the western end, which helps to tie in that end of the building and contrast it with the movement simulated by the angles below.

A tour of the building returns one to the discipline of a reduced palette and a rigorous control. The main architectural studio on the top floor runs the whole length and is lit by a south-facing clere-story, working with a monopitch roof. Students from different years thus sharing space and environment are conscious of the whole into which they fit. At the east end there is a large roof terrace where you can take a break, or down a drink. Because there is, as it were, an absence of detail, there is no fuss and the building becomes the background to work.
One further departure from the strict whiteness is found in the columns on the south elevation. These are finished as smooth concrete cylinders. A couple that carry the loads of the lecture theatres are fatter than the rest but they hang together as a family. The acrylic render is applied to the outside of the performance space, so that the building as a whole has the recognisable look of stilted modernity. Elsewhere, structural loads are absorbed by the walls, or appear as rectangular blocks along the strip windows. The structure is admitted but not emphasised.

This is, in sum, a discreet building that works first at being useful, then in looking good. It does not proclaim a unique vision but it reinterprets modernity in a unique way. It stands clearly for progress, and it deserves to have a bright future. The campus, if it follows the Mather masterplan and reaches a successful landscaped stage, will be a collection of city blocks that will provoke an urban renaissance and provide a civilised environment.