Library and Attached Stairs to Grounds at the University of East Anglia

Details

1188/3/10106
TG10N3
16-OCT-03


NORWICH
EARLHAM ROAD
(South,off)
Library and attached stairs to grounds
at the University of East Anglia


GV
II


University Library. Built in two phases, 1968 and 1972, to the designs of Denys Lasdun and Partners, commissioned in 1962 to produce a master plan for the new University of East Anglia, and completed by Bernard Feilden and David Luckhurst. In situ 12" thick reinforced concrete slabs spanning both ways supported on 20" by 20" columns spaced at 22'6" centres. Increased loads at the perimeter are supported on a system of factory-made precast concrete walls 6'6" deep and 8" thick which serve also as natural light diffusers. External precast spandrel panels 11'3" long interlock with the structural columns. Flat roof with service and lift towers. Six floors with pedestrian entry off the university walkway at second floor level. Two floors of reading and stack are positioned above the entrance and administration floors and two floors of reading and stack below. The services, lifts and stairs rise within an internal vertical core - the rest of the space left as flexible as possible.

Aluminium anodized frames, vertically pivoted. Precast concrete transoms acting as photobolic reflectors span over windows at 7' above floor level. The enclosure of space by these walls and the wide concrete transoms spanning between them provides an intimate scale at the perimeter; their absence from the set-back administrative floor over the entrance gives the building its modulation while giving emphasis to the entrance floor and walkway, which continues as a gallery round two sides of the building. Top ventilation windows are set back to the inner edge of the transom. Spiral staircase from second-floor (entrance floor) walkway to ground in corner. The connecting section of the walkway, and attached buildings, that link the library with the spine and Norfolk and Suffolk Terraces are not included.

The building was designed to be built in two phases to hold nearly 500,000 books and seat 1,000 readers. Interior with stacks, fluorescent light fixings, and seating in bright colours set close to the windows. Concrete stairs in unpainted concrete well at the junction between the two phases.

The University of East Anglia was founded in 1960, and Lasdun was commissioned as consultant architect in April 1962. The site was 165 acres of parkland on the edge of Norwich, used by the local authority as a golf course and flanked by the River Yare, dammed to form a lake (or broad) in c.1977. Lasdun was determined to preserve the flat, marshy and very open valley landscape and the line of ziggurats placed where the valley begins to rise is part of this. The library was the university's first signature building, placed at the centre of the site in a greensward or harbour created by Lasdun as the centrepiece of his campus.

'The powerful sculptural forms of the Lasdun UEA make the university proud to find itself on the international circuit. The buildings themselves, however, should be seen not only as form-making and an intellectualised counterpoint between the building mass and the landscape; they give lessons in consistent detail throughout a wide-ranging building programme and illustrate a single-minded effort to ensure high quality maintenance-free exteriors and internal elements within permitted cost levels' (Architects' Journal, 14 June 1972, p.1334). Of all the new universities of the 1960s the architecture of UEA 'has most consciously created a visual impression of experiment and enquiry, yet without the use of bizarre forms of materials, and notably without recourse to any academic architecture' (Tony Birks and Michael Holford, Building the New Universities, 1972, p.73).

Sources
Arup Journal, March 1968, pp.36-41
Frank Thistlethwaite, `The University of East Anglia', in Murray G Ross, New Universities in the Modern World, London and New York, Macmillan/St Martin's Press, 1966, pp.53-68
Architects' Journal, 14 June 1972, 1322-38
Tony Birks and Michael Holford, Building the New Universities, Newton Abbot, 1972, pp.73-83.
Denys Lasdun and Partners, A Language and a Theme, London, 1976
Diane Kay, University Architecture in Britain 1950-75, unpub. PhD thesis, Oxford, 1987, p.184
William J R Curtis, Denys Lasdun, London, 1994, 87-101
Stefan Muthesius, The Postwar University, Utopianist Campus and College, London, Paul Mellon Centre/Yale University Press, 2001 p.149
Stefan Muthesius, Concrete and Open Skies, The University of East Anglia, 2001

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