Reinventing Spaces
Spaces and Stories of (Higher)
Education: an historical investigation
Laura Evans
Cath Lambert
Hannah Lever
Laura Moorhouse
Danny Wilding
A collaborative project based in the
Sociology Department at Warwick and the
School of the Built Environment at Oxford
Brookes
Promotes new methods in teaching
and learning with a focus on researchbased learning
Redesigns the spaces in which
students learn
Funds undergraduates to carry out
research (£1,500)
Funds academics to develop
research-based teaching (£10,000)
www.warwick.ac.uk/go/reinvention
Spaces and Stories of (Higher)
Education: an historical investigation
To find, generate and document data relating to the
design and development of university classrooms
within the UK.
To analyse the data in order to identify the
pedagogic discourses that may have shaped key
architectural and design decisions.
To map out trends in the design and development of
pedagogic spaces, including commonalities and
disjunctures over time.
Methods
Archival research in Modern Records
Centre, looking at University
committee reports, buildings
archives, prospectuses, ViceChancellors meetings minutes, and
other material .
Interviews with people who emerge
via the archival data as having
relevant stories to tell.
Visit to RIBA’s HEDQF exhibition,
September 2009.
Review of literature and critical
reading of spatial theory.
Questions

What ideas and ideals around a) higher
education? b) the university and c) the university
student, are constructed through the design and
building of the University of Warwick?

How do the idea(ls) come to matter through sitespecific practices?

(How) are these idea(l)s contested?
1964
The Idea of a
University
The University is located on the southern outskirts of Coventry,
some 2 ½ miles from the centre of the city, astride the CoventryWarwickshire boundary. The magnificent site of over 400 acres
… is set in a landscape in which the typical Warwickshire field
and hedgerow pattern is intermingled with woodland planting.
The site is the largest in Britain designated
entirely for university development.
The University of Warwick Prospectus, 1966-67, p9
[There’s] something about having an
architectural centre whose utility really is to
uplift your spirits and to give you a focus
and to be an emblem of your identity, and I
have always thought that Warwick could do
with a bit more of that […] [it] makes people
walk with more of a swagger
Hugh Garston Hall, Interview
William Pye
Spring Sixty Seven, 1967
Located in International
Manufacturing Centre
Circa 1965-66, all the university was on
the other site and then once some
departments had moved , staff still went
back to the other site for lunch. There was
a lunch hour. All staff and students ate in
their own groups separately.
Hugh Garston Hall, Interview
Students are uneasy about the notion of
educational community and about the place of
the teacher. They are uncertain about the
isolation and academic single mindedness of
their universities. They feel the citing and design
of their campuses often aim at reinforcing this
sense of separation and undivided purpose ...
they feel anxiety when confronted by designs
which reinforce the comparative status of
teacher and taught.
Trevor Fisk, 1970: 294
One new university, Warwick, has been
designed with all the students' facilities on one
side of the campus, all the teaching and
administrative areas on the other. In between
there are several hundred yards of 'no man's
land'. The whole arrangement seems to have
been laid out to facilitate trench warfare
between staff and students; the scheme might
have been expected to reinforce feelings of
'them' and 'us’ …
Fisk, 1970: 294
If they enter colleges the design of which
is totally inadequate to their needs and out
of keeping with their aspirations, the blame
will rest as much on today's students for
their silence, as on the college planners
for interpreting that silence as consent
Fisk, 1970: 294