Simon Phipps

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!