Courts and Community: Denys Lasdun's Fitzwilliam House
Duration: 33 mins 27 secs
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| Description: | Lecture by Dr Barnabas Calder, delivered at Fitzwilliam College as part of the symposium "Building Fitzwilliam College 1963-2013: An Architectural Journey" on 25 June 2013. |
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| Created: | 2013-07-15 13:03 | ||
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| Collection: | Fitzwilliam College lectures | ||
| Publisher: | Fitzwilliam College | ||
| Copyright: | Fitzwilliam College | ||
| Language: | eng (English) | ||
| Distribution: |
World
(downloadable)
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| Keywords: | architecture; lasdun; Fitzwilliam College; lecture; | ||
| Credits: |
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| Explicit content: | No | ||
| Abstract: | Denys Lasdun was one of the most internationally admired British architects of the 1950s and ‘60s. From 1958 he designed the first buildings for Fitzwilliam House, as part of the institution’s drive to obtain its collegiate status. In this lecture, Dr Barnabas Calder revisits the ‘essential nucleus’ which Lasdun provided as the central point for the College’s future growth, and compares Lasdun’s strategy for collegiate planning with others of the post-war university expansion, particularly with the court-dominated planning of the various new colleges of Cambridge and Oxford.
Fitzwilliam has been overlooked within Lasdun’s body of work. This lecture proposes to recognise it as part of his hugely diverse and energetic stylistic experimentation of the 1950s through which he developed the architecture which was to make him Britain’s leading architect of the 1960s. The design for Fitzwilliam will also be shown to be a close relative of some of his most influential and admired architecture, especially the Royal College of Physicians, designed and built over the same period. Dr Barnabas Calder is a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool School of Architecture. His research focuses on the history of architecture since 1950, and he is writing a book on British Brutalism for William Heinemann. At Christ’s College for his PhD on Denys Lasdun he lived in Lasdun’s student residences there, and afterwards he catalogued much of Lasdun’s archive at the RIBA Drawings & Archives Collections. He is now producing an online complete works, Lasdun Online, funded by the Graham Foundation and hosted by the RIBA. |
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