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The Judge Institute of Management Studies, Cambridge University, England |
Click once on the pictures to enlarge them to full screen size and bring up the Captions |
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THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE The best way to understand the Judge Institute building is to think of it as a fragment of some giant Metropolis unaccountably marooned in a little English country town. The best way to come upon it is to enter the gate of Downing College. Walking past Quinlan Terry's brand,new Doric Library portico and entering the wide campus lawns of the College, set with Classical stone pavilions in the manner abandoned in Britain after the French Revolution, one comes upon a strange and unnerving sight. A great polychromatic temple looms in the sky to the West. In fact it may not unnerve the inhabitants of Downing, for they already inhabit Greek buildings, even if they are the pale uncoloured ghosts resurrected by the Renaissance. Those who need to acquire an intellectual handle on the Judge buildings are the great majority in the University who accept the myth projected by Cambridge's Post '45 War Architecture. This is that of a country town inhabited by a community of Rustic Mechanicals with a facility for invention such that it leads to rich crops of Nobel Prizes and the No. 1 slot in the Island Albion League of Academicals. The Judge strips the pretensions from the hyperbolic modesty of this rustic paradigm and projects at least one of the modern Institutions of the University at the metropolitan, national and, indeed, global scale of its real ambition. In doing so the Judge strips the veil of that unassuming modesty, which is the unnerving prerogative of real aristocrats, from this fragment of the University and reveals it as it, and its older fellows have been for many centuries: a player on the global stage. STOLEN CLOTHES The oddity of the actual event is that this 'stripping off' of the Post-war pretence of an Proletarian humilitude was brought about not by any very direct Architectural assault upon the prevailing paradigm, but by filching the clothes of a mid 19C Monument, not of Gown, but of Town. Nor was this a brave and honest decision of the University. It was a predicament forced upon them by some of the Historians of Art at the University. For it was they (the 'Gowned) who encouraged English Heritage (for the benefit of the 'Town'), to 'list' the giant façade of the City Hospital for legal preservation. THE 'TABOO-BREAKERS'. Two Agents now stepped into a situation which had, by this act, passed entirely beyond the iconic vocabulary of the 'Rustic Paradigm' under whose aegis laboured the the Agencies established to house the University's Faculties. They were the two financial Donors of the new building, Paul (now Sir) Judge and the Honourable Simon Sainsbury. They were determined to abolish the prevaling 'Cambridge-style' lifespace disguise of a politically defunct 'welfare culture' and institute something more honestly ambitious and brilliant. This is why they appointed my firm, and not one which was accustomed to working with the University Surveyors. For it must be said that these Agents, proposed by the University to choose their Architects as well as control their designs, in the early 1990's, were as entirely free of Architectural culture as the grey skies of the Fens. The Donors, along with their adviser, Colin Amery, chose JOA as their Architect, and they entirely, and directly, controlled every aspect of the design. The Judge Faculty, themselves, interacted creatively. But the University, as such, did nothing except keep the Minutes and sign the Contracts. Their technical, and managerial Agents made not one single contribution to the design and specification of the project. It was an object lesson in the extreme lengths to which it has been necessary to wean even the highest levels of the British from their dismally institutionalised Welfare Culture, with its cult of dumbed down proletarianism, iconic illiteracy and early-retirement pensionnareism. MODERN MONUMENTS Any building, today, which means not necessarily a major one, for a major Institution, is free to use itself, especially on its interior (where it affect no-one but its own 'citizens'), to project a futuristic view that envisages (according to them, at least) a quantum-leap in lifespace-culture. The Judge began by being a great façade that looked outwards across a forecourt. It was the opposite of the typically inward-looking courtyarded College. This was because its building originally enjoyed a civic role of great importance, encompassing physical life and death. It was obvious that the Judge building could be the occasion for a major demonstration of certain radical new ideas in lifespace-design. The whole project went forward on this basis, serving both the particular interests of the Institution together with the larger project of a radically re-engineered lifespace culture in general - just as does any legitimate Cambridge research project. No one invents new intellectual paradigms to be consumed merely within a cycle ride of the Cam, so why should Architecture? THE AGONIES OF COMING CLEAN The advent of directly-donated money destroyed the long-established relation of Oxbridge to Whitehall that ensured that State funds, lost from their individual sources into the cosy bureacracies of Whitehall, travelled quietly and unobtrusively up from the Department of Education and Science to diverse Faculties. These made sure to house themselves in patently illiterate sheds which could never be recognised as what they were, the lifespace of an uniquely gifted, hard-working class of intellectuals whose ideas were well out of the normal reach of the middle class, let alone the masses. In this way the intelligentsia, such as they were, disguised themselves from the envious eyes of the less gifted and less ambitous. AND THE EASE OF STAYING GRUBBY The Judge, for a brief moment, attempted to destroy this dissimulation. It was the best chance that the beleagured supporters of the 'high culture' had to publicly testify to the depth and range of their complex intellectuality (well, in fact, only on a building's interior). But they ran away from it and cowered behind their old disguise of 'humble poverty'. A building of patent iconic richness, especially one funded by real, individual, nameable, 'millionaires' was not popular with the University. And it was not only the University's Surveyors who chafed under their new subjection to cultured and wealthy Tycoon's along with their London Design Teams. The Dons and Fellows also disliked being exposed as being possessed of recherche cultural qualities &endash; more especially as they had no secure means of judging whether this 'difference' was properly mediated by an Architectural Medium whose dominant, and spuriously 'local', qualities, since 1945, had been to deny itself capable of any rhetoric except that of the 'honest, proletarian, woodworker and bricklayer'. This was the so-called 'Cambridge Style', as it was known from the 1960's onwards. It was the style JOA were hired to defy and overcome. It was, no doubt , inevitable (for that is what happened) that this attempt to demonstrate the superiority of a modernised 'high culture' over either the dumb frauds of Arte Povera, or the more extrovert puerilities of 'Pop-Mechanics', should ultimately be thwarted by the intellectual confusion and public pusillanimity of the Establishment. It was also, no doubt inevitable that this self-inflicted class-cultural suicide would be followed by redoubled attempts at the dissumulation of Cambridge's real stutus and ambition. These retreats were enthusiastically aided by Professionals, shocked by the history of the 1980's into the recognition of the inability of their contemporary Architectural Medium to mediate anything more intellectually sophisticated than the plodding pragmatism of the Welfare aesthetic with which the University Administrators still remained most comfortable. Cambridge relapsed back into the rustic vocabulary of - turf roofs, shade-louvres, vent-cowls and sundry other fashionably agricultural devices more suited to the pedagogy of milking-cows than the most brilliant young minds of Britain. IN A NUTSHELL The Judge Institute of Management Studies was established
in 1990 from the teaching work previously carried out in the
Cambridge University Engineering Department. In 1991 a
design competition was held for converting the Old
Addenbrookes Hospital, located on Trumpington Street close
to the city centre and unused for over 10 years into a
purpose built facility for the new institute.
ExteriorIt had been decided to remove the early 20C top floor,
which everyone found ugly. But all that it needed was a big
new cornice scaled to the whole facade, and a dado to bring
it down in scale itself to that of an 'Attic' floor, thus
giving the faculty valuable expansion space. |
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INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS THE GALLERY: "SEMINAR-BALCONIES" THE GALLERY: "ENTERING THE CASTLE" THE "WARD BLOCKS AND 19C FACADE" THE GALLERY- "SEMINAR BALCONIES"
THE "WARD BLOCKS AND 19C FACADE TOPPED BY A NEW CORNICE"
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AWARDS Civic Trust Award Brick Development Association Special Award RIBA Regional Award David Urwin Award "Best Building of the Decade" Lighting Award Paint Award Joinery Award
AREA: 9,000 sq.m., CREDITS:Client: Cambridge University .
Click here for Judge Institute of Management Studies links
* JOA can be reached by E-Mail at anthony@johnoutram.com , by telephone on +44 (0)207 262 4862 or by fax on +44 (0)207 706 3804. We also have an ISDN number : +44 (0)207 262 6294. |
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