Roger Stevens Building

Here we are at the Stan and Audrey Burton Gallery – an exhibition with a Pink Floyd-ish hue.

Curiously brick-ish, for work largely concerning concrete.

Did they not know the Madcap Syd wrote See Emily Play down the road at the now demolished Leeds College of Technology?

A fact I discovered whilst researching my Leeds Walk.

Myself I would have gone with – Borrow Somebody’s Dreams ’til Tomorrow.

For here we have an exposition of the architecture of three Universities, exploring the possibilities of a new age.

An age typified by the expansion of minds and opportunities in higher education, rendered corporeal in glass, steel and concrete – with some concession to the use of brick.

Basil Spence at the University of Sussex

Denys Lasdun at the University of East Anglia.

And Chamberlin, Powell and Bon at University of Leeds.

I was minded of the political context to these campuses, radicalised by the events of the late Sixties and early Seventies.

Myself a student at Portsmouth Polytechnic during these heady days, where several Maoist, Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist and Trotskyite factions played out ideological debate and display, against these Modernist backdrops.

Epitomised by the Hornsey School of Art sit-in.

On the day of my visit to the Leeds campus, I saw three students stood behind a hardboard paste table, selling the Socialist Worker.

Along with staff building support for the following day’s UCU strike.

So to the exhibition – Another Brick In The Wall at the Stan and Audrey Burton Gallery until Saturday 25th March.

Photographer Simon Phipps shines a contemporary light on the innovative designs of this period. He has produced new work of a variety of campuses, including the University of Leeds, exclusively for the exhibition.

Alongside these contemporary photographs, the exhibition displays archival material from the Universities of Leeds, Sussex and East Anglia.

Rarely seen material from the Arup archive is also exhibited.

Let’s take a look at a topic from a bygone age that seems to come of age – there’s never been a better time to be Brutal!

Go and take a look, we really do need education – and exhibitions.

The Roger Stevens Building 1970 – by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon for Leeds University South Campus is designated at Grade II

The building represents the high point of their Leeds University work.

Architecture: the building is an outstanding and individual design with bold external shapes and carefully designed interiors

Planning: the internal spaces are the result of extensive research on the requirements of the university and introduce innovative and influential features such as individual doors into the lecture theatres, and external links intimately with other buildings on the campus by means of multi-level walkways

Intactness: despite the changing requirements of universities, the building has remained largely unchanged, proving the success of its design

Group Value: the building provides a fitting centrepiece to the group of university buildings on the South Campus at Leeds, also recommended for designation.

Historic England

I was asked by the Leeds Modernists to put together a walk which avoids the the Roger Stevens Building, so I did just that.

That didn’t stop me visiting the site on the day of my visit.

This is what I saw: