Benjamin Carter
Infrastructure/Megastructure: Forms of Consolidation at the UMIST Campus and MEC Hall, Manchester
Essay 3 - Pilot Thesis
Figure 1 Frontispiece: The MEC and UMIST Campus Figure 2 Opposite: morphological open and closed forms
comparison
of
Benjamin Carter
Infrastructure/Megastructure: Forms of Consolidation at the UMIST Campus and MEC Hall, Manchester
essay submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design Benjamin Carter - Essay 3 Pilot Thesis University of Cambridge Gonville and Caius College March 2021 4,943 words
Contents
1 1.1 1.2 2 3
Abstract Introduction: Project Unity and the Formation of a New University Part One: Comparative Campuses: Infrastructure and Megastructure The UMIST Campus The Manchester Engineering Campus Part Two: Evolving Political and Pedagogical Priorities Part Three: Potential of the Campus Conclusion: Concerning Consolidation List of Illustrations Bibliography Abbreviations
VUM UMIST MEC(D) UoM HE UICC
Victoria University of Manchester (the University) University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (the Institute) Manchester Engineering Campus (Development) University of Manchester Higher Education University of Illinois at Chicago Circle
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Forms of Consolidation at the UMIST Campus and MEC Hall, Manchester
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Abstract Increasingly the spaces of higher education are influencing and infringing on the space and form of the city. As student enrolment and university endowment continue to rise, the built environment of higher education is increasingly present on the cityscape as large capital projects and extensive estate regeneration programmes1. In part one of this essay, using the case study of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) Campus and its successor, the Manchester Engineering Campus (MEC), this paper distinguishes between the built environment of the urban university campus from the post-war period to today. This paper understands the university as a continuous project, in part two it explores the evolving political relationship with the city, and the pedagogical relationship with the student across changing campus types. Finally, in part three, this paper will speculate on the future of the UMIST Campus in the face of redundancy, and propose how the space of the urban university campus can be reorganised to exploit vestigial spaces of edification in the city. Introduction: Project Unity and the Formation of a New University June 30th 2004, the University of Manchester Bill is put before parliamentary committee in order to ratify the decision to dissolve both the Victoria University of Manchester (VUM) and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in order to form a new institution combining their respective assets2. That new institution, to be known as the University of Manchester, would assimilate the aforementioned autonomous universities into Britain’s largest single-site university. Citations Paul Bolton, ‘Higher Education Student Numbers’, House of Commons Library Briefing Paper, 7857 (2021), 10 <https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjN0JafjOnuAhVBY8AKHRixClQQFjAOegQILBAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fresearchbriefings.files.parliament.uk%2Fdocuments%2FCBP-7857%2FCBP-7857.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0ob7uP1fZLKUNqd9RnmaeU> [accessed 14 February 2021] 1
Unopposed Bill Committee (2004), ‘University of Manchester Bill’, Minutes of Evidence 30 June 2004, Parliament: House of Commons 2
Figure 3 Opposite: map of the vicinity of the two campuses. 01 02 03 04 05 06
University of Manchester main site Oxford Road Knowledge Corridor Manchester Engineering Campus Mancunian Way/ Upper Brook St UMIST Campus Manchester City Centre
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Both parliamentary and royal consent for the merger, named Project Unity for the University’s purposes, was approved and the new university came into being on October 1st 2004. The restructuring of Manchester’s universities into one of the country’s largest institutions was the first step towards an institutional consolidation not only in name, but in creating the largest enrolment of any single on-campus university in the UK comprising close to 40,000 students3. In order to oversee the merger and act as intermediary between the two universities and Parliament, Project Unity was established whose purpose was threefold4. First, in the aforementioned capacity as joint company to manage the transition; second, a symbolic unification of the two universities into a ‘virtuoso institution’; and third, as an eponymous masterplan for the university who was now in possession of two disjointed sites5. It is in the second and third aspects of Project Unity that this essay shall concern, and shall briefly be expanded upon here. Project Unity, which incorporated VUM and UMIST, was a venture to create a single world renowned university from two mutually inhibitive institutions. Despite a history of collaboration and common mission between the two universities there remained a number of physical and political impediments to their unification, not least that UMIST, as the smaller university, had ‘more to lose’ in being annexed within the larger institution6. Although UMIST was the smaller institution, it had a more varied heritage and specific identity owing to its specialisation in the sciences, and to this day the new University cites UMIST’s earlier foundation date Higher Education Statistics Agency, ‘Table 1 - All Students at UK HE Institutions by Domicile, Level of Course, Mode of Study and Institution 2004/05’ in Higher Education Statistics for the UK 2004/05 <https:// www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/publications/higher-education-2004-05> [accessed 2 March 2021] 3
University of Manchester Bill (2004), Parliament: House of Commons <https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmprbill/003/04003--a. htm> [accessed 2 March 2021] 4
Donald MacLeod, ‘On the Prowl for Nobel Prizewinners’ (2004) <https://www. theguardian.com/education/manchesteruniversityunited/story/0,,1332528,00. html> [accessed 1 March 2021] 5
Higher Education Policy Institute, Case Study 4: The University of Manchester and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (2003/14) <https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ Manchester-UMIST.pdf> [accessed 6 March 2021] 6
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Figure 4 View over the Old Quadrangle at VUM looking towards the city centre. UMIST is visible directly beyond the tower on the right hand side. c.1960
Forms of Consolidation at the UMIST Campus and MEC Hall, Manchester
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as its own7. Furthermore, the merger was criticised for not fulfilling ‘typical objectives’ of rationalisation, but as an ulterior identity-driven operation in institutional boosterism and an attempt to position the University within the national triumvirate of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, known as the Golden Triangle8. The merger dictated that both institutions would formally dissolve in 2004, yet each retained a distinct identity within the new university due to their geographical division and particular urban and architectural characters. UMIST, a purpose-built post-war campus on the fringe of the city centre, was separated from the University proper by a number of major arterial routes. More salient yet are the differences in the urban form of the two campuses. In planning terms, the modernist UMIST Campus represents an antidote to the ad hoc urbanism of the ‘redbrick’ model which VUM typified. The latter had gradually and forcefully inserted itself within the linear residential streets south of the city centre, whereas the UMIST Campus was executed as a single masterplan ab initio. The new University of Manchester had inherited two sites now united in name, but contrasting in character, a division which the Project Unity masterplan set out to rectify. The overarching ambition behind Project Unity was to establish a ‘superversity’ capable of competing on an international scale and able to attract reputable scholars, who would be engaged in designing curricula, and indeed designing the academic buildings themselves9. Project Unity represented more than a masterplan to rationalise the university’s estate, but a wider ambition to stimulate the economic transformation of Manchester as a knowledge capital, and in so doing insinuate the university seamlessly within that economy, enacting the so-called ‘third mission’ of modern universities as economic catalysts10. At the time of writing, the project for the Manchester Engineering Campus Development (MECD), successor to UMIST, can be seen to inherit the principles of Project Unity in reinforcing the links between education and industry in a new research-intensive environment. The MECD seeks to relocate and replace the former UMIST Campus facilities within a consolidated megastructure at a centralised location by concentrating departments on the main university site. Where first Project Unity rendered UMIST defunct qua university, now the MECD project renders the UMIST Campus itself redundant, and plans are in motion for its demolition and redevelopment. While currently largely intact, the UMIST Campus will be superseded by the MEC Hall by redistributing all departments to the new engineering campus in a co-located academic environment and grouping departments into larger schools. Both integrative projects - i.e Unity and MEC - demonstrate an exercise in institutional consolidation and concentrating learning environments, where intersections between disciplines can more readily occur in an intramural setting11. In this first section I shall map out the shifts in learning environments, employing UMIST and MEC Hall as barometers for the evolving academic landscape. Luke Georghiou ‘Strategy to Join the Elite: Merger and the 2015 Agenda at the University of Manchester - an Update’, in Mergers and Alliances in Higher Education (Springer International, 2015), p. 210. 7
8
Ibid, p. 205.
9
Donald Macleod (2004), op. cit.
Steven Smith, ‘Project Unity’ <https://urbannarrative.com/Project-Unity> [accessed 2 March 2021]; Tim May and Beth Perry, ‘Cities, Knowledge and Universities; Transformations in the Image of the Intangible’, in Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy (2006), p. 263. 10
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Peter R. Green, interview by Benjamin Carter (online, 12 March 2021)
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Part One: Comparative Campuses: Infrastructure and Megastructure This section introduces the two campuses in question within the scope of this paper. Prior to introducing the UMIST Campus and the Manchester Engineering Campus, it is first necessary to define the term ‘campus’, as this will be a critical determinant in later considerations. A campus is a cluster of any number, type or form of buildings or programmes sharing a finite territorial area, hosting independent entities whilst serving a collective purpose. Multiplicity of parts is also a requisite of this definition, a campus may exist within the domain of a single organisation, however its structure is necessarily composed of distinct or quasi-independent, even potentially incompatible entities within. This definition disqualifies mono-functional groupings of buildings frequently labelled as ‘campus’ today. Whilst it may appear to be paradoxical that an inclusive purpose may be established from plural, even divergent interests, the success of the campus depends on its capacity to appropriately assimilate internal constituents and express a holistic identity without neutralising the specific identity of any one group. When I refer to the university campus in this essay, I refer to the physical architecture of that built environment, rather than the idea of the campus and all that it embodies. In discussing how modern universities might represent systems of government or society per se, Clarke Kerr suggested that the university ‘may be inconsistent but it must be governed… as a complex entity with greatly fractionalised power’, indicating that campuses are a place for pluralism but also incorporation, if not an environment capable of reifying that polyvalence12. The materialisation of the modern university as a polity which is as universal as it is specific remains a fascination for university leaders, planners and architects. In the post-war era of democratised higher education, these influential agents of change were frequently granted tabula rasa conditions to conceive not only new forms of architecture, but new forms of society through the vehicle of campus planning. Many new HE institutions in England were built in rural landscape, evoking the etymological origins of the campus as a ‘field’, where there was unparalleled license to forge a new post-war vision of an ideal community. However, the aforementioned definition does not disqualify campuses in urban areas, insofar as they occupy a clear territory and do not extend indefinitely into the city fabric. This essay shall focus on two urban campuses, where the idea of realising an ideal community is conditioned by the influence of the city, whose political influence is reciprocated in return by the presence of the campus. Clarke Kerr, The Uses of the University, 5th edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) p. 15. 12
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Figure 5 + 6 Morphological comparison of campuses at relative scale 5 6
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above: the UMIST Campus as infrastructure below: the Manchester Engineering Campus as megastructure
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The UMIST Campus
Institution Status
federated university 1956 - 1994, fully autonmous university 1994 - 2004
Estate Schedule
14 department buildings built between 1960 - 1974 and 2 pre-existing c19 buildings
Academic Composition
21 departments over various technical disciplines, answerable to the UMIST Council
Spatial typology
Low rise laboratory wings and connected tower on podium blocks
The UMIST Campus is a unique exposition of an ‘enlightened’ era of citywide coordinated planning, forming an anchor point of an unexecuted plan to connect a radically restructured city centre with elevated pedestrian walkways13. As such the campus remains isolated from the wider network within which it was designed to integrate. While Manchester boasts great individual works of modernism, no other such comprehensively planned environment was realised in the city during this period. Directed by the UMIST Planning Development Committee, a consortium of architects working collaboratively in the International Style produced a unified scheme in the ‘canons of good design’ set out by the Committee and pursuant to the principles of a masterplan emphasising the setting of University buildings defining a landscape of courts in the collegiate tradition14. These canons stipulate economy of material application, and recommend judicious tectonic expression, whilst also involving ‘aesthetically satisfying’ forms designed from the ‘inside outwards’15. A task which the involved architects appear to have interpreted imaginatively. Cohered by these parameters, the campus is an orderly yet varied forum of modernist buildings with some individuation according to the purpose and requirement of each building. Two such buildings expressive of their function are the Renold Building (1962) and the Barnes Wallis Student Union building (1967). Their programmatic specificity is expressed externally; in the case of the former, with a serrated gable whereby each pair of folded planes contains a lecture theatre, atop a projecting podium displaying a glazed assembly room. In the case of the latter, a refectory is indicated by a jettied clerestory volume and the cellular grid of student rooms in the adjoining halls of residence. The abstract language of this collegiate modernism relies on volumetric expansion of key spaces to signify the theatricality of the university’s programmes, as if pressing out of the building envelope. The architectural expression of two distinct programmes is reconciled by the uniform material expression and cubic morphology of the pair, which face one another across the bowling green court. Hugh Wilson and Lewis Womersley, Manchester Education Precinct 1974 (Manchester, Manchester City Council, 1975), p. 1. <https://luna.manchester. ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/Manchester~14~14~913~157066?qvq=q:martin%20 dodge&mi=14&trs=92> [accessed 19 January 2021]; John Millar, City Centre Map 1967, (Manchester City Council, 1967), p. 123. [online] <https:// issuu.com/cyberbadger/ docs/1967-city-centre-map> [accessed online 10 January 2021] 13
The University of Manchester and the Manchester College of Science and Technology, Joint Submission to Manchester Corporation respecting Future Developments, (Manchester, 1960) p. 4. 14
Hubert Worthington et al., Manchester College of Technology Aesthetic Guidelines [online] <https://www.flickr.com/photos/seva_nmb/10807121746/ in/album-72157625954083649/> [accessed 15 February 2021] 15
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Figure 7 Renold Building section. Lecture theatres define the gable’s pleated profile.
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The Renold Building is a prototype in itself, as the first university building to assemble teaching and lecture facilities within a single building: the section is composed of a totem of auditoria, classrooms, and assembly rooms, and as such forms an anchor for the Institute’s educational programme16. The aim of such a building is to encourage interdisciplinary contact and overcome the rigid departmental zoning of typical university models, a reaction against the status quo of antecedents such as VUM. Consequently, the design is also an unprecedented type, preceding Circle Forum at UICC Chicago, a later assembly building at a comparable urban university, by some years17. This will to innovation in form, and individuation within an integral ensemble reflects the broader mission of the Institute, and demonstrates how the built environment of the campus can, in itself, become instructive of grander ideals. Notwithstanding individual buildings of note, the urban form of the campus is defined by its setting of linked quadrangles. A series of monumental open spaces whose urban character is in part defined by the ‘intensive’ development of the available site is counterbalanced by an abundance of publicly accessible landscape for the benefit of Manchester’s citizens as well as the student body18. Instead of any singular building containing all the Institute’s functions, the UMIST Campus can be understood as an urban infrastructure, whereby the common spaces of exchange and incidental spaces of encounter are located in a publicly accessible forum between the critical learning spaces. Simply put, the infrastructural campus puts student life on display. This was considered a crucial aspect in the development of the campus, that its infrastructural form would host amenity ‘not restricted to those immediately residing or working in its confines’, and enable, in part through on-site provision of student residences, a community to which the student and lay citizen could participate and contribute to in the public eye.
Richard Brook, ‘1962: Renold Building, Manchester’, 100 Buildings 100 Years, (2014), <https://c20society.org.uk/100-buildings/1962-renoldbuilding-manchester> [accessed 8 March 2021] 16
Stefan Muthesius, The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 198.
Figure 8 Above: the Renold Building as an early tower on podium building and a prototype for new university typologies.
17
The University of Manchester and the Manchester College of Science and Technology, (1960), op. cit., p. 4. 18
Figure 9 Left: an oblique view through the campus courts toward the Student Union, with Renold Building to the left. 1972
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The Manchester Engineering Campus
Institution Status
research facility within UoM
Estate Schedule
£420 million development of 3 new halls and renovation of grade II listed Oddfellows Hall
Academic Composition
4 consolidated engineering schools and research centres
Spatial typology
Single megastructural MEC Hall with connected ancillary blocks on a historic grid layout
The Manchester Engineering Campus consolidates the facilities previously housed at the UMIST Campus into a single hangar-like environment on the main UoM site. The MEC co-locates the varied departmental structure of UMIST into four interdisciplinary schools, with UMIST’s non-engineering subjects now distributed into separate premises away from MEC Hall. The campus is primarily incorporated within the eight storey tall, 195m long MEC Hall, which assembles a varied programme containing, inter alia: lecture theatres, teaching environments, laboratories, workshops within a single specialised academic environment. The project marks a transition from previous learning cultures by concentrating complementary expertise within an ‘under-one-roof’ or ‘within-the-walls’ suite of facilities, whereby interdisciplinary communication can be facilitated between the four engineering schools. The architecture of the new campus interior reflects the academic imperatives of flexibility and informal communication, whilst optimising space utilisation and building access with fewer dedicated entrances. Within the hall, the intramural co-location of departments within a megastructure, and the design of continuous concourses and atria (one for each school) establishes an uninterrupted internal street within the MEC Hall, attempting to break down the typical cellular partitioning of HE buildings19. These indeterminate 24/7 access areas comprise loose furniture and effect a ‘soft ownership transfer to students’, allowing the interdisciplinary areas to be reconfigured to accommodate spontaneous use20. The four schools of engineering are contained within a relatively uniform envelope, which does not differentiate departmental or internal programmatic organisation21. The infrastructural condition of the campus street is enclosed within the interior of the hall. This contains the urbanity of the campus intramurally and is therefore only capable of projecting externally the institutional nature of the campus, rather than the potentially cosmopolitan attributes which arise from the interface of student and public life. Unlike UMIST, the MEC Hall is not a university, rather a facility, and as such it lacks many functions which provide programmatic multiplicity and therefore, vitality. By way of compensation, the MEC Hall and auxiliary structures use transparency to display technical apparatus at ground floor level, with large glazed apertures onto the interior. Where Woods Bagot, MECD - Workplace Brief Report Summary (2016) <https://www. staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/media/eps/eps-intranet/mecd/documents/WoodsBagot-Workplace-Report-summary.pdf> [accessed 9 March 2021] 19
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Mecanoo, Manchester Engineering Campus Development, Design and Access Statement (Manchester, 2016), p. 103. <https://pa.manchester.gov.uk/ online-applications/files/7419B5AB88DC917A56E5D35DBBA05584/pdf/111758_ FO_2016_C1--566614.pdf> [accessed 7 March 2021] 21
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Peter R. Green, interview by Benjamin Carter (online, 12 March 2021) Figure 10 The internal street within the MEC Hall provides reconfigurable spaces for informal study.
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UMIST projects the life of the student body, MEC displays their work, in this regard the MEC Hall is a machine for working in, with a diminished collegiality typically associated with comprehensive HE institutions. The consolidated academic nature of the MECD is reflected architecturally in the design for the new campus, whose strategy is to assimilate a restructured and simplified ‘school’ system into a singular recognisable form. This not only amounts to an architectural consolidation, but moreover finalises the institutional consolidation initiated by Project Unity. 2.
Part Two: Evolving Political and Pedagogical Priorities The atomised infrastructural qualities of the UMIST campus, and the consolidated megastructural qualities of the MEC Hall will herein be further dissected in order to address the evolving political and pedagogical priorities of the modern university. As previously established, Project Unity sought to combine VUM and UMIST into single institution to boost not only its ‘research power’ through a critical mass of students and researchers, but furthermore to rebalance its standing in relation to Golden Triangle universities and build its reputation abroad22. The MECD project can be understood as the physical implementation and penultimate phase of Project Unity, the final being the redevelopment of the UMIST Campus into an innovation district. As is the case of any HE estate, large capital projects such as the MEC Hall are designed not only to fulfil functional requirements but serve a symbolic purpose of attracting scholars in the competitive system of modern higher education23. As the largest capital project of any UK university by scale and expenditure, the £1billion plan to realise a single-campus solution 22
Luke Georghiou, (2015), op. cit., pp. 205-220
Tony Halpin, ‘Competition will lead to Campus Mergers’ (2003) <https:// www.thetimes.co.uk/article/competition-will-lead-to-campus-mergers07qmsg7v9mf> [accessed 2 March 2021] 23
Figure 11 The campus conceived as a large floorplate interior
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(of which MECD amounts to £420 million), highlights how the ‘edifice complex’ has become synonymous with HE expansion24. Not unlike the UMIST Campus, MECD constitutes a significant urban intervention on a cleared site, yet unlike UMIST, which was built on industrial land, it is not reliant on municipal compulsory purchase authority but repurposes a parcel of land which came into the University’s estate following the Project Unity merger25. The consequences of such building programmes are manifold, but particular weight is given in this section to two aspects; first, the political; that extensive development of this type highlights the role of universities in determining the form of cities; second, the pedagogical: it reflects an expectation on the part of students that university estates should be more than sites of pure learning, but socially formative in themselves. The political, as understood here, is conceived in terms of space and the built environment, specifically the relationship between the campus infrastructure, and the form of the city. The new MEC Hall is contained within a much more compact form, with auxiliary buildings linked by bridge. Moreover, there is a significantly reduced emphasis on movement through and provision of publicly accessible open space, compared to its predecessor, UMIST, where a pedestrian precinct of concatenated courts provided space for students and citizens alike. With regards to the political form of the campus - that is how it interfaces with the city - we see a transition from the urban, but isolated, form of the UMIST Campus to the architectural, but integrated, form of the MEC Hall, with the former comprising extensive urban realm in order to overcome its institutional attributes. To elaborate on the respective campuses and their urban interface; first, the UMIST Campus, irrespective of the unrealised plans to connect it to the fabric of the city, left undeveloped sacrificial land around its periphery to accommodate expansion. The planned continuation of its generous court structure into a non-academic domain proposed a radical new form of urban space in the post-industrial city, to the betterment of its citizens. Today, the abundance of green space within a series of enclosed courts gives the impression of an urban walled garden. As realised, the positioning of tall and wall-like buildings around the edge of the campus, coupled with this unresolved relationship to the immediate vicinity, only emphasises the self-contained condition which afflicts the campus today. Alternatively, the MEC hall recreates the historical grid pattern of long linear streets defined by intensive development to the street edge, evocative of the industrial city. This shift from monumental spaces to monumental buildings represents a transition from the innovative civic ambitions of the UMIST planning committee. This ambition was to provide a prototype for an ideal institution not only in service of its own needs, but that of the city which it seeks to reform, in part, through urban design26. In discussing the UICC Campus, Chicago, Sharon Harr questions ‘should new buildings replicate the city of the past or posit new spatial, technical, and aesthetic experiences?’27. A possibility which UMIST seems to adopt by conforming Deloitte, Manchester Engineering Campus Development Planning Statement (2016), p. 3. <https://pa.manchester.gov.uk/online-applications/ files/5BFFB698B9F7888FF1734AF57DD01B6F/pdf/111758_FO_2016_C1--405843.pdf> [accessed 7 March 2021] 24
Planning Sub-Committee, Proposed Site for Development Scheme (Manchester, 1955) <https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/ Manchester~14~14~244~149134?qvq=q:martin%20dodge&mi=3&trs=92> [accessed 4 January 2021] 25
Bertram Bowden, Manchester College of Science and Technology Space Requirements (1955), pp. 1-2. <https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/ luna/servlet/detail/Manchester~14~14~244~149134?qvq=q:martin%20 dodge&mi=3&trs=92> [accessed 4 January 2021] 26
Sharon Harr, The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. XV. 27
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to the historic city grid as palimpsest, but dissolving the associated rigid block network into a chequerboard of verdant courts. Conversely, the form of the MEC Hall recreates the fabric of the historic city, rather than positing new forms of urban space.
The question of an urban institution producing modern citizens, not only good students, is a key mission of any modern urban university, as is their legacy to create civic-minded spaces, and the architecture of the campus can be instrumental in achieving this aim28. This demonstrates how the UMIST Campus, in its architectural and spatial innovation, proposed to transform its political identity in relation to the city, the following will address how a campus can also embody a pedagogical programme with respect to the student through the design of spaces for education. For the purpose of this essay, the pedagogical, here interpreted as the relationship between the built environment and the student experience, can be analysed by studying the changing relationship of student life across the two campuses. Unlike the political aspect between campus and city, the pedagogical aspect concerns the campus and the edification of the student as urban citizens. This definition of pedagogical is not limited to explicitly defined educational programmes, but to the campus as a whole, and includes the possibility of the campus to be a tangible pedagogical tool in itself. As an institution comprising on-site halls of residence and a complete suite of recreation spaces in the student union (Barnes Wallis) building, the student experience of the UMIST Campus has the advantage of providing a potentially total academic community within the coterminous limits of the campus. The emphasis on on-site residence was a relatively new phenomenon stemming from post-war HE democratisation, with one UMIST planning report considering the residence to be instrumental in assisting students in finding ‘a real purpose in life’ beyond their studies29. ‘In a Hall of Residence’ the report continues, ‘the student finds himself a member of a community in which it becomes easy and natural for him to play a part’30. The importance of recognisable social units that a student could affiliate with is made possible in the residential university, and becomes a site of pedagogy in itself, in the sense that the student’s personal development was as essential as their professional development. Furthermore, the proximity of residential and academic space served to intensify the life of the campus, by overlapping aspects of university life previously considered incompatible. It should be noted, The University of Manchester and the Manchester College of Science and Technology, (Manchester, 1960), op. cit., pp. 8-9. 28
The University of Manchester and the Manchester College of Science and Technology, Joint Submission to Manchester Corporation respecting Future Developments, (Manchester, 1960), p. 11. 29
30
Ibid.
Figure 12 Comparative figure/ground plans of landscaped areas at UMIST as imbricated courts (left) and MEC as thoroughfares (right)
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therefore, that the campus once again performed as a prototype for new modes of urban living: by reinserting housing into the city centre, largely absent since Manchester’s industrialisation. Finally demonstrating that, for comprehensive urban university campuses, the political and the pedagogical are always interlaced. The MEC Hall can not capitalise on such localised vitality, with the majority of UoM’s residential provision situated some miles away in suburban Fallowfield. Instead of democratisation by provision of on site accommodation, the MEC Hall creates interdisciplinary communication through intramural unprogrammed spaces, substituted for the student residence, which conventionally would fulfil that role. These spaces, intended to foster informal contact and collaboration were designed to ‘rip up the common room’ convention and combine that programme with transit spaces to encourage serendipitous encounter31. They manifest themselves as break-out spaces, open plan work areas, large circulation streets which permit a degree of indeterminacy in an otherwise specialised environment. In these spaces, the potential for overlapping public and private interests is limited by virtue of its interiority, unlike UMIST where there was a planned emphasis on the interface of political and pedagogical32. In such a rarefied milieu as the MEC Hall, without the possibility of alternative modes of occupying the space of the campus which enrich student life, the definition of the campus set out in part one is moderated. The Manchester Engineering Campus may be a campus by its physical definition, but in the absence of the multiplicity of parts required to create the pluralistic preconditions of the campus it can only truly be described as a facility serving an educational mono-culture, rather than the broad pedagogical experience of a vital urban university campus. In the investigation of the political and the pedagogical at the two campuses one key conclusion can be drawn. Through the process of merger into larger institutions, the capacity of the university campus to be local, that is, for the student to play a part in the life of the campus, and for the campus to influence the form of the city, is diminished. For the two case studies in question, we can observe that the intersection of political and pedagogical aspects of life on campus available at UMIST is impeded at MEC, by virtue of its incompleteness as an institution and the segregation of student life and labour. As an exposition of the potentiality of the urban campus, in the final section I will speculate on how the the UMIST Campus can be modified to reaffirm its infrastructural qualities in a wider project which attempts to condense the urban form of the campus into a new architectural prototype. 3.
Part Three: Potential of the Campus Vestigial spaces of modernism are widespread in the UK, and are considered divisive environments. The UMIST Campus is an exemplar of a total modernist precinct, an attempt to materialise the ‘white heat’ of technopolitical revolution in an ambitious, and equally judicious architectural form. The distinctiveness of such environments when realised comprehensively retain their unassailable architectural presence but rarely convey clues to their reuse, compounded by the difficulty of interfering with their object-like quality. These problems face the UMIST Campus today. With Project Unity rendering UMIST obsolete as an institution, and the present vacancy of the campus with the imminent completion of MECD, the campus faces an uncertain future, following endorsement from university and municipal authorities in favour of near total demolition and
Figure 13 + 14 Spatial Syntax diagrams showing the relationships between public and private areas of the two campuses. 13
31
16
Peter R. Green, interview by Benjamin Carter (Online, 12 March 2021)
The University of Manchester and the Manchester College of Science and Technology, (Manchester, 1960), op. cit., p. 4. 32
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above: gradated access: the MEC hall as a linear campus system with centralised control points below: nucleated structure: the UMIST Campus as a constellation with direct external access
Forms of Consolidation at the UMIST Campus and MEC Hall, Manchester
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redevelopment33. Already piecemeal developments have begun to erode the campus edge, undermining the holistic disposition of the campus. Preliminary design studies explore the spatial potential of the campus, and speculate on how the urbanism of the campus, itself a micro-city, can be intensified to make that idea legible on a more apprehensible scale: in the form of a campus in miniature. Further design provocations polarise the future campus into; on one hand, a situation of controlled exploitation, a scaffold for incremental development; and on the other, a situation of managed ruination, enhancing the perception of the campus as a field of objects. These proposals question the spatial potentiality of the campus, namely the inherent urbanity in the campus type understood as an arena of specific programmatic situations, and serve as a basis for the superimposition of successive ideas bound up in the fecund concept of the campus. Conclusion: Concerning Consolidation This research into tangible and intangible processes of consolidation has addressed policy and architecture as vehicles in the evolution of novel political and pedagogical relationships within campuses. Across the three time frames covered by of each part of this essay, from post-war UMIST, to the current MECD project, and hypothetical futures of the campus, the campus as a rich spatial and ideological locus has been explored through the lens of the HE imperatives of consolidation in order to perform on an ever more competitive national stage and amongst the global elite. As competition demands a consolidation of assets, a critical mass of students and researchers, and economies of scale, mergers into ‘superversities’ will become means by which HE providers can achieve rapid global recognition as we have seen through Project Unity34. As the university becomes larger, we have seen also how the campus can become smaller. The effects of consolidation on the university community are variable; cosmopolitanism might be sacrificed in favour of rationalisation, with increasingly specialised facilities diluting the potential for agonism in the intersection with diverse pedagogical interests. In the face of fluctuating estate consolidation vis-à-vis large capital projects, the question facing architects in the position of designing the campuses of today is not only how to plan for expansion, but how to plan for contraction in an ever evolving built landscape of the urban university.
Manchester City Council Executive Committee, Minutes of the Meeting Held on 14 December 2016, exe/16/151 (2016), pp. 7-8. <https://democracy. manchester.gov.uk/Data/Executive/20161214/Agenda/minutes_exec_14_ dec_2016.pdf#search=%22minutes%22> [accessed 10 March 2021] 33
34
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Luke Georghiou (Springer International, 2015), op. cit., p. 217.
Figure 15 -20 Hypothetical spatial responses campus as an infrastructure 15/16 17/18 19/20
to
top: a campus in miniature middle: scaffold for incremental development bottom: a field of objects
the
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List of Illustrations
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view towards the city, c.1960 <https://personalpages. manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/PWM/hopkinsslides-PWM-symposium.pdf> [accessed 12 March 2021]
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<https://modernist-society.org/mcr/tag/ Renold+Building> [accessed 20 March 2021] redrawn by author
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frame 24, 1972 <https://www.flickr.com/photos/ kh1234567890/1453085541/in/pool-umist/> [accessed 25 January 2021] used with permission
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Mecanoo <https://www.mecanoo.nl/Projects/ project/160/Manchester-Engineering-CampusDevelopment> [accessed 22 March 2021]
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<https://idea.eu/projects/manchester-engineeringcampus-development/> [accessed 2 March 2021]
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