Unsticky Bath

In my University days I had the good fortune to live and study in Bath, a City renowned for its architectural beauty and world heritage status. The University campus itself however was a relatively modern facility, certainly not a contributor to the heritage of the City (at least at that time although, like me, it has aged a bit since then) and some would say not a thing of architectural beauty, or at least not the traditionalists who favour the style of John Wood (senior and junior), the architectural Godfathers of Georgian Bath.

The designers of the original campus buildings had the freedom of a green field site to work with and chose to create a composition of discrete academic buildings, accessed from a large common circulation podium, with the library at the centre and a residential tower at each end. An urban composition foreshadowing the ‘mixed use’ concept so familiar today. This worked well in the daytime when the podium was alive with book laden students scurrying from one building to another, but died at night when the stark qualities of the student union bar paled against the charms of the city nightlife. The campus lacked ‘stickiness’.

I wonder what the designers of today would come up with if the campus had not been created in the 1960’s but was still a green hill top about to be bestowed with a brand new campus by a government keen to dip into the public purse for the benefit of future generations, as unlikely a proposition as this question might seem in the current economic climate.

They might have started by questioning whether a site remote from the attractions of the City itself, be they social or commercial, was the best place to be. Modern universities cannot be an island. For sure the mix of spaces would be different – less rooms with four walls, less raked lecture theatres and definitely less rooms full of hard wired computer terminals housing battery hen students tapping away learning source code (oh Fortran, the hours we spent together…).

Now we understand that the gold lies in the grey areas and overlaps that exist between the faculties and between the university and the wider community. Complex problems need multi-disciplinary thinking and collaborative working; this mirrors the world that graduates will enter and need to be prepared for. Digital native, technology enabled students have information on tap wherever and whenever they choose; facilitating the technology is the easy bit. The challenge in today’s environment is to break down the barriers, be they physical, psychological or indeed political, to facilitate an open source anytime/anywhere approach to learning.

The course I studied at Bath pioneered multi-disciplinary education in building design through the Joint School of Architecture and Building Engineering. Much of what we learnt focused on passive design; the use of sun, light, heat and air flow, harnessed through an appreciation of architecture to produce spaces that delight and engage whilst using these natural resources to create comfortable, low energy environments. In fact, just the sort of spaces that we need to be creating to engender collaborative working and stickiness in today’s campus environment.