How do you preserve a modern building? Oxford City Council, St. Clement's Car Park and the Florey Building

There’s a planning controversy taking place near to where I live in Oxford. The Watkin Jones Group has made an application for planning permission to develop the site currently occupied by the St. Clement’s car park as a thirteen storey accommodation block for students. It is a pretty complex story, and a lot of vested interests are jostling for position. Residents claim that the proposed thirteen storey flat block would disrupt Oxford’s skyline, while local businesses are insistent that the reduction of car parking spaces would have a critical impact on trade. However, there is also a severe shortage of housing in Oxford, which is tending to result in the residential community around the Cowley Road being priced out of the market by wealthier students. I suspect another factor will prove to be crucial in how this story plays out: Oxford City Council is set to earn £3.57 million from the sale of this site; at a time when, due to cuts, the Council can’t afford to implement the Magdalen Road Controlled Parking Zone I can’t see them turning down that inducement to care about the accommodation of its studious population.

St. Clement’s car park is also home to the Florey Building, designed by James Stirling, and accommodation for Queen’s College. It was designed in 1966 and finished in 1971; as the last of Stirling’s glass, steel and tile series of buildings for universities (how we can only wonder at such a grand and ambitious period of investment), the earlier buildings being at Cambridge (Selwyn College and the History Faculty) and Leicester (Engineering). It’s a grand segment of a sphere on stilts, consisting of student rooms arranged in a semi-circle orientated to the northwest. On the carpark side, its walls are faced in Stirling’s signature red tiles, but it is seen to its greatest effect from Magdalen deer park. From this angle it is a bowl of glass and steel rising ghost-like through the mist of the meadows. The Florey building was part of Stirling’s attempt to rethink the forms of the modern university, and to reimagine the principals of modernism itself, dismembering and recombining its forms in order to reinvigorate an aging style. Its geometric forms of glass and steel look back towards the early era of the machine aesthetic while the unrefined components and strong structural forms bring a new unpolished hulking power to the design. To me, it is one of the best buildings of the university. It’s certainly much more progressive and intelligent than much of what the institution has built since (the Sackler Library, Magdalen’s Grove Building, Hertford’s Graduate accommodation, I could go on...).

 Stirling's nice little drawing of the Florey building.

I admit that the fate of this building may seem peripheral to the social and economic forces playing out over the fate of the carpark, but it’s worth considering. If the new flat block is allowed, it will cut the Florey building off from its original site, and dwarf it in scale; indeed, this argument has been used repeatedly by the car park’s defenders. It is well known that Queen’s College sees this building as an enormous, leaky and malfunctioning burden, so they might just try to sell the site to the developer. But how do you preserve a modern building? Stirling insisted that he was a functionalist; like his predecessors in modernism he argued that his buildings he designed took their form from meeting the needs and requirements of those that he designed for. If this is the case, then surely the way to preserve a modern building is to replace it. If its design no longer meets the needs of Queen’s College, and if the way it is using the land no longer maximises its potential, then surely to take the rhetoric of the modernists to its logical conclusion would be to knock down their buildings and in their place create structures better suited to the needs and tastes of the present day. To be sure, these architects were dispassionate enough in their treatment of the past in their own time (remember Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris?).

But this reading all might be a bit too simple. Any more than a cursory reading will reveal that St irling was anything other than a pure functionalist. He built a glass bowl on stilts, for god’s sake. Interesting, yes; functional, no. Furthermore, the modernity of his designs was hardly unadulterated either. As described above, he looked back as well as forwards to create a complex form of interlacing references. Stirling’s (and the rest of them: the Smithsons, Ladsun etc.) were far more complex in the way they built than the way they barked.

 Functionalist? It looks like a teacup.

Fifty years after the post-war ‘welfare architecture’ building boom, the fate of these explicitly modern buildings now stands at a crisis point. And due to their experimental use of materials and explicitly theoretical designs, the question regarding their survival or replacement is far more complex than those regarding their historicist predecessors. This all has considerable relevance for the future of the St. Clement’s car park. On balance, this student accommodation shouldn’t be built on a tiny, sensitive site. Moreover, it shouldn’t be built on the carpark that serves Oxford’s very few remaining independent shops. However, it’s the celebrity in the carpark which draws media attention, and which could prove to be instrumental in forcing the council’s reversal.

Sim City 2000: twentieth-century cities, urban modernity and my fourteen-year old self.

I’ve been thinking about Sim City 2000 a lot. I think I should start playing it again. Not this new fangled-The Sims stuff. All that social engineering micro-management makes me a bit uncomfortable and should be probably left to creeps or Nikolas Rose’s grad students. No, my interest is in the future-once, macro-civilisation game, Sim City, and in particular, the version it came out roughly around 1997.

Day one. Not a lot to report but sheep, tumbleweed, and me. Everything going OK.

In this game, the object is to build a ‘successful’ urban community. Really, there is no object, as the game has no ending, but the rewards-system is based on a criteria based roughly around the ‘happiness’ of your citizens. You start out with a rocky bit of terrain, maybe with a bit of sea and a bit of a river and some red earth. At this stage most of the icons are greyed-out. All you can do is build some houses, maybe a road and a couple of convenience stores, and sit back and hope that people come. If you are lucky (I’m lucky), houses are bought, families move in, people start buying groceries. As they consume, you can tax, and therefore build more homes with your honestly-earned electronic money. As more people move in, the icons become ungreyed. Surpassing a population of 5,000 gives you access to building libraries, hospitals, and schools. You can lay waterpipes and electricity lines to keep the lights on and the plants watered. With these lower-tier amenities the ‘happiness’ of your citizenry increases, more people arrive, you get higher taxes so you can build build build. Fingers crossed, the population then jumps above the next designated threshold. More and more amenities become available! You no longer are just supplying the population of BurritoVille (n.b. I like towns named after snacks) with milk and bread, and fixing their broken arms, but providing them with Saturday night bread and circuses! Stadia, shopping malls, cinemas all become available! In an effort to cater not just for body, but also for mind and spirit you keep building. You become the Donald Trump of your own virtual world, in feverish lust for increased capital, and more ungrey command-tools, you add miles of anonymous suburbs to lure more and more taxable-citizens to your very own computer generated Los Angeles. High-rises! Inner-city motorways! Airports! Fusion nuclear power plants!

 That's the family friendly fun I mentioned. Lets go see a ball game and pay some taxes kids!

Year 200. Beginning to worry I might have gotten a little over-excited by my desire to build. Not many parks anymore. 

In an effort to gain access to more taxes, more capital and more amenities, the entire screen is eventually filled by buildings, leaving no rural hinterland to my modern metropolis. All the free space goes in an effort to continue populating the city, until you gain access to “Launch Archologies” (their name, not mine!): self contained towns of 200,000 people that hover a mile above the rest of the population and exist within their own ecosystem. By this time their large shadows and huge energy usage also leads to large areas of urban decay (yes there’s code for that in Sim City too). Apparently once you’ve built fifty Launch Archologies, they explode/set off to find new worlds to be introduced to the proud civilisation of my happy Burritoistas. I wonder why the annihilation of my townsfolk though their more-than-probable firey death in a Quixotic search for a Brave New World is really such a good thing.  But its their game not mine.

All this raises some interesting questions about the nature of urbanism and the megolamaniacs who wrote this programme. I admit it, I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about what this game meant about the city in the 1990s and urban modernity more broadly. The model of urban design upon which it is based is one which Robert Moses would recognise, and which was predominantly accepted throughout the twentieth-century: a vision of the city as a place of the future, a place of continuous destruction and recreation, where increased property prices, increased population densities and increased consumption were held up as aspirational values. From first glances it appears that the game designers probably hadn’t read their Jane Jacobs. But then again, to pretend that she, or the multitudes like her put any more than the smallest dent in the ongoing trajectory of 20^th century city is to write history through textbooks not places, so maybe the fact that there is no ‘allotments’ button or ‘co-operative store’ icon is a good thing. But maybe this game is actually cleverer than that. This hyper-real, mass-market computer game where everyone can shape their vision of the city, but you are constantly pushed towards a 1960s city of urban motorways and high rises seems to be on further reflection a grandiose and bizarre in-joke. It is constructed around the self-help of Jacobs, the simulacra and populism of Venturi, and inevitably the urban forms of Moses. In a game where to win is to make your city so unbearable that your citizens live inside air-controlled chambers, ready to shoot off to discover a more inhabitable planet is a nice sort of neat irony. Its a nice way to end the twentieth century anyway.