A view of ‘Trinity Heights’ from the Fellows’ Garden

Since my PhD I co-founded an employee survey company, called Qlearsite, where amongst other things I applied the latest advances in natural language processing to the task of discovering what topics a company’s employees are talking about. It is very satisfying watching someone genuinely understand what is important to their employees in a matter of minutes whilst knowing just how much computation had to take place in order to make this possible. Recently I moved to Silicon Valley so I could live permanently with my wife and I now work at Abacus.AI, a machine learning platform start-up, where I am leading their efforts to build anomaly detection and natural language processing systems. My journey of automating pattern discovery continues.

A view of ‘Trinity Heights’ from the Fellows’ Garden (as it might have been) Boyd Hilton (1974)

In the Annual Record for 2018, pp. 118–132, I discussed the former Bursar John Bradfield’s architectural tastes, which leant towards a brutal modernism at odds with his generally conservative social attitudes. The explanation is probably to be found in his passion for the idea of a re-tooled UK plc built along scientific and high-tech lines. Accordingly, he strongly supported the work of two cutting-edge modernists, Kenneth Capon and Michael Powers of Architects’ Co-Partnership (ACP), and in particular their deliberately ‘fierce’ design for the campus of Essex University, which was initially conceived as Britain’s answer to MIT. I discussed in my earlier essay how Bradfield brought ACP to design Trinity’s dramatic Wolfson Building, and also how he sympathised with the same practice’s 1971 competition proposal for a residential development on Burrell’s Field, comprising three 48 metre towers to match in height, and form a cluster with, the University Library tower. I hazarded that the proposal might have been a spoof and certainly it was a nonstarter, scoring just one vote among the Fellowship as against 42 for David Roberts’ plans, which eventuated in Adrian and Butler Houses. Bradfield was very likely the lone supporter and certainly it was he who ensured that the Committee report preceding the vote should refrain from any aesthetic criticism of ACP’s ‘striking and dramatic’ design with its ‘clean and elegant lines’.

The model of ACP’s proposal for the Burrell’s Field development, with a shadowy UL tower in the background.

Frustratingly, I was not able to illustrate the ACP proposal, but this I can now do thanks to the kindness of Professor Alan Powers, architectural historian and writer, who turned up a number of images while working through his late father’s papers. I am extremely grateful to him for allowing me to reproduce this contemporary photograph of the architects’ model.

Image Reproduced by kind permission of Professor Alan Powers.