Summary
Residential accommodation blocks for Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, designed by MacCormac, Jamieson and Prichard, built 1984-1986.
Reasons for Designation
New Court at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, a series of residential accommodation blocks designed by MacCormac, Jamieson and Prichard, built 1984-1986, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
Architectural interest:
* as an important work by MJP, a celebrated architectural practice;
* as a significant example of high-quality post-modern design in a residential and academic context;
* for the complexity and variety of the building's highly detailed exteriors and interiors;
* as a creative solution for a restricted site, unlocking an undeveloped part of the college and reforming the site’s masterplan;
* for their successful role translating Lasdun’s earlier scale, materials and orthogonal character into new modes of architectural expression.
Historic interest:
* as a progression of nearly eight centuries of college construction within the University of Cambridge;
* for its place in the highly significant body of post-Second World War university architecture in England.
Group value:
* for its functional relationship with the Grade II listed Grove, Central Hall Building, and the Chapel at Fitzwilliam College.
History
In 1869 Cambridge University established a Non-Collegiate Students’ Board for students who could not afford traditional college membership. By 1950 this had become ‘Fitzwilliam House’ and was facing an existential crisis as Government grants provided fully funded university places to more students than ever before. Fitzwilliam responded by attaining formal collegiate status within the University, and obtaining funds from the University Grants Committee (UGC) for the construction of a purpose built college in the west of Cambridge.
The site was ‘The Grove’, a Regency villa built in 1814. By the 1950s it was owned by Winifred Armstrong who provided the land needed to begin the college. However, Mrs Armstrong retained a life interest in the house and around three acres of gardens at the centre of the college site. They would be fenced off from the college until her death in 1988.
Denys Lasdun secured the role of architect, submitting his first designs in 1958. Construction was underway between 1960 and 1967 on the first phases of the college. His designs had to account for the stringent UGC budget and the physical obstacle of the Grove and its gardens. Neighbouring colleges Murray Edwards (formerly New Hall) and Churchill had twice and three times the budget for student rooms respectively in comparison with Fitzwilliam.
Lasdun’s masterplan allowed for almost all of the traditional features of a Cambridge college to be delivered from the very first phase, whilst also allowing for the continual expansion of the campus as the rest of the site became available. His ‘snail shell’ masterplan sought to create an orthogonal spiral of unenclosed courts, allowing every building to have views of the hall.
The plan was not fully realised. In 1969 Lasdun himself proposed a U-shaped court between the first phases and Storey’s Way. The scheme was impossible at that date in light of the continued presence of the Grove. By 1981 the college could no longer wait for the new land around the Grove and planned to expand its accommodation by building an additional storey on top of Lasdun’s residential blocks. Lasdun thought this would destroy the architectural character of the college. In 1982 he finally ended his involvement with Fitzwilliam, never having the opportunity to reconcile his first phases with the full extent of the site.
The need for new accommodation was addressed in 1984 by MacCormac, Jamieson and Prichard (MJP). Led by MacCormac, the firm delivered a new masterplan for the college that maintained the scale and material quality of Lasdun’s architecture, but increased the density of development by building around the perimeter of the site. It envisaged, too, a gatehouse block that would form the formal entrance from Storey’s Way (later delivered by Allies and Morrison).
MJP’s first buildings at Fitzwilliam (and in Cambridge) were the residential blocks that form New Court at the south-west corner of the college. Constructed 1984-1986, New Court provided accommodation for 100 students and resident fellows. Each staircase (Q – T) had eight rooms per floor, with shared bathrooms and the first communal kitchens in the college. Each floor has a different appearance, internally and externally. The stepped planes of the exterior provide corner windows for every bedroom, allowing the students to inhabit the elevation like the saints of a Gothic church (MacCormac, 2013).
The banded floors, three-storey scale, and brown brick of New Court harmonise with Lasdun’s earlier blocks. MJP shared a mutual appreciation with Lasdun for the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose influence is clear in the pitched roofs and timber framed components of New Court. There are quotations, too, from John Soane, whose house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields provided the source material for the stepped elevation, and whose preoccupation with natural light inspired the creative use of daylight throughout the building. MacCormac rejected the identity of a post-modernist, but it is an attribution which may be harder to avoid here than in other works by the firm.
As originally configured, the student bedrooms were fitted with wash basins. Baths, showers, and lavatories were shared facilities accessed from the corridors. In the early C20 the rooms were reconfigured with full en-suite pods in each.
The only major alteration to New Court occurred in 2003 with the completion of Gatehouse Court, to the designs of Allies and Morrison. The new building finally provided a formal entrance to the college and fulfilled aspects of the MJP masterplan in the process. It attached to the east end of New Court.
MJP returned to the college in 1990-1991 for the creation of a chapel at the east end of Lasdun’s P-Staircase. The final C20 addition to the college was the creation of Wilson Court at the south-east corner of the site by van Heyningen and Hayward in 1994.
Richard MacCormac (1938–2014) was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at the Bartlett School in London. After stints with Powell and Moya and Lyons, Israel and Ellis, he joined the London Borough of Merton in 1967, designing acclaimed groups of low rise housing which developed the ‘perimeter planning’ concepts first advanced by Martin and March at the Cambridge School of Architecture. MacCormac partnered with Peter Jamieson in 1972 and was later joined by David Prichard to form MJP, with MacCormac in the role of principal designer and spokesman. Their early focus was on housing schemes, including extensive estates at Newport, Gwent, at Milton Keynes, and at Shadwell Basin (Grade II listed, 1986-88, their only listed building). The 1983 Sainsbury Building at Worcester College, Oxford, marked a breakthrough for the practice. It was swiftly followed by projects at Fitzwilliam College (their first in Cambridge), Trinity College and Trinity Hall in Cambridge, as well as Wadham, St John’s and Balliol Colleges in Oxford. Later buildings include work at Warwick and Lancaster Universities, a new centre for Cable and Wireless outside Coventry, and Southwark underground station. MacCormac was knighted in 2001.
Details
Residential accommodation blocks for Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, designed by MacCormac, Jamieson and Prichard, built 1984-1986.
MATERIALS: the buildings are constructed of blue-brown brick laid in stretcher bond with white concrete dressings. The roofs are covered in metal sheets.
PLAN: the L-Shaped plan of New Court follows the western boundary of the college. It includes Staircases Q – T. At the north, Q staircase connects to Lasdun’s 1966 accommodation blocks. At the south-east, T staircase adjoins Allies and Morrison’s 2003 Gatehouse Court.
With some variations, each staircase has eight bedrooms and one communal kitchen per floor.
EXTERIOR: New Court is three storeys high and is built of blue-brown brick with white cement dressings. Its materials and storey heights continue those of the Lasdun accommodation blocks to the north.
Each floor is stepped over three planes, creating corner windows in every bedroom, each with a projecting roof over a small clerestorey window. At ground and first floor, these small roofs have rain chains feeding integral planters. Small waterspouts have been moulded into the sills and bands across the exterior of the building to further manage rainwater disposal.
Despite the apparent variety, every staircase is symmetrically planned, and the pattern repeats across each unit. The entrance to each staircase is centrally positioned, and forms a two-storey feature with the large kitchen windows of the floor above.
The eaves of the metal-clad roof project over a recessed clerestorey which runs for the length of the entire building. The roof itself is pitched, with regularly spaced lanterns along its ridge.
The rear or west elevations facing Wychfield Lane are equally stepped, varied and detailed, though without the major feature of the entrances at the centre of each staircase block.
The only major break in the pattern of the external elevations is on the south elevation, where S and T staircases connect. Here the building confronts the blank exterior of the Squash Courts (1981, designed by David Roberts and Geoffrey Clarke). In deference to the latter building, New Court reduces its thickness to a single pile and ceases its restless series of projection and recession. The major features of this elevation are a timber-clad staircase and two glazed corridors at the first and second floors.
INTERIOR: each staircase unit has a central stair hall. At the first floor landing this branches into four symmetrical stairs: two small flights lead into the first floor corridors, and two separate, longer flights lead up to the second floor. The walls of each flight are lined in oak veneer panels and bands of lacquered wood. The steps themselves are tiled, and at the centre of the stair hall is a deep light well, flooded with daylight from roof lanterns. In the middle of the open volume at the centre of the well is a light fitting: a wood and steel grill with a mirrored glass sphere at its centre. At each level there is a communal kitchen shared by up to eight students; it is centrally positioned but different arranged according to the changing plan of each floor.
On either side of the stair well on each floor is a lobby providing access to four bedrooms. On the first floor these have fitted benches and an internal window that borrows light from the floor below.
Bedrooms have oak doors, fitted cupboards with black wooden frames that match black dado and picture rails, and the black timber supports of the corner window and its roof structure. Second floor rooms have exposed timber roof structures.
