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.