1960s university buildings : the golden age of British modern architecture /

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: The Sixties -- Prelude: Suez, Sputnik and socialism -- 1. Winning the peace -- 2. The old knights -- 3. The new universities -- 4. The new colleges -- 5. Interlude: education, a nubile cinderella -- 6. The planners -- 7. The urbanists -- 8. The contextualists -- 9. The missionaries -- 10. The structuralists -- 11. The prefabricators -- 12. The disruptors -- 13. Interlude: Less R&B, more R&D -- 14. The new knights -- 15. Back to the future – Notes – Bibliography – Index.

The 1960s continue to hold an almost mythical place in Western culture, particularly in Britain, where change was widespread and infiltrated many aspects of life. This included architecture, whose role in a modern democracy and the form it should take were hotly debated. This book discusses the architectural thinking of the time through an examination of the design of university buildings. While there were notable buildings being built in other spheres, no other field of architecture provided the opportunity to express those ideas as freely, while also reflecting innovative new thinking about education and society. Somehow, the university buildings of the 1960s seemed to represent the cutting edge of modern architecture in the UK. This book provides the first critical analysis and overview of these buildings, designed by some of the leading British architects of the period including Basil Spence, Leslie Martin, Alison and Peter Smithson, Denys Lasdun, Powell and Moya and James Stirling. By placing the buildings in a wider social, cultural and political context, it examines the combination of circumstances and attitudes that produced results that are equally admired and detested and allows us to understand how we might replicate or avoid them in the future. --Publisher