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The University of East Anglia in Norwich. It is hard to imagine, today, the excitement that was aroused by the foundation of seven entirely new universities in England in the early 1960s. Sussex, York, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Warwick and Lancaster set out to combine Oxbridge acumen with Welfare State fervour and were convinced that they had created the university anew. Teaching, organisation and especially all social-educational-institutional concepts were open to experiment. UEA belonged to those who, in addition, believed that these new ideas and programmes had to be embodied in an entirely new kind of campus design and for this they chose one of England's most forceful and individualistic architects, Denys Lasdun.
Here we deal with the whole multifaceted enterprise through its ups as well its downs and controversies. Powerful masses in grey concrete were not to everybody's taste in the 1970s, when, in any case, costs had to be cut to the bone. However, along came UEA's greatest stroke of luck, Norman Foster's Sainsbury Centre. Under its own steam UEA then went into the Post-Modern eighties with Rich Mather and, much more lavishly - while at the same time advancing a new architecture of ecology - under Mather and Miller, in the 1990s.
Thus the book provides an analysis of the complex interaction of originating, commissioning, designing, building, using, appreciating, rejecting and re-appreciating a campus, in the 'heroic' period of the 1960s and 70s, as well as through the more sophisticated decades later on. Or, in other words, it is the story of the university as a patron, creating a small world of masterly architecture, diverse, yet coherent, with its impact, regionally, nationally and even internationally.
Whether or not the university's day-to-day users are aware of it: it is campuses like UEA's which account for a fair proportion of the world-wide renown of English architecture today.
