form + function = faculty squared

Cambridge has managed to fuse science with style. It's a work of genius, says Jonathan Glancey
Centre for mathematical studies, Cambridge University
"There is no reason why buildings for scientists should be four-square and matter-of-fact functional"

form + function = faculty squared


West Cambridge is a conservation area. Here are suburban houses of varying quality, built largely for varsity dons between the 1880s and 1960s. For centuries, Cambridge dons had lived in their venerable colleges, but, once allowed to marry in the late 19th century, they spread across the flat fields west of the city. Now, one of these surviving fields has blossomed into a most unexpected flowering of new suburban architecture. What Edward Cullinan and his team have come up with in this grove of academe is a blueprint, of sorts, of how we might build intelligently and graciously on the edge of our towns and cities.

In seven lush suburban acres, seven new pavilions together form Cambridge University's new centre for mathematical studies. Seven years in the making, here are seven pillars of architectural wisdom. Instead of responding to this suburban site with twee and tweedy, fey and bricky buildings, Cullinan's team has come up with a gathering of low-lying yet almost exotic pavilions revelling in what at first glance seem to be a modern English equivalent of Mughal towers, all swoops and curves, cascades and tumble-downs of brick, metal, steel and stone.

In the wrong hands, such elements could spell a giddy, postmodern-style architectural confection, or mess. Yet this gently exuberant new university development is nothing of the sort. The profile of these joyous buildings will make you smile, in the way, perhaps, that the work of England's most expressive Arts and Crafts architects did here a century ago.

The design of the new centre had to house and represent a marriage, of sorts, between two university departments: applied mathematics & theoretical physics and pure mathematics & mathematical statistics. These, in turn, comprise 25 mathematics groups and require 340 separate offices. The solution, keeping all parties happy, is these seven pavilions gathered around a central, partially sunken building containing restaurant, communal meeting space and lecture theatres. The inner four pavilions clustered around this focal building form a new Cambridge court.

From the surrounding avenues, the new centre is characterised by the tops of its stepped pavilion towers. The new buildings are gentle and attractive neighbours, but with a character very much of their own. This kind of relationship between different ages and styles is a characteristic of the best English suburbs.

When I first came here some months ago, I had imagined a grim gathering of dull, if rational, business-park style buildings. This is not what I would have expected of Cullinan, but I had not known his firm had been working on this discreet £50m project. Somehow, and utterly unfairly, it was easy to equate mathematicians with straight-laced, straight up and down, 90-degree buildings. And yet, not only does mathematics contain and imply great beauty, but there is no reason why buildings for scientists should be four-square and matter-of-fact functional. The Einstein Tower (1919-21) in Potsdam, designed by Erich Mendelsohn in his expressionist style is one enchanting example of how a building designed for a scientific and mathematical purpose - it is a solar laboratory - can be high-spirited. The centre for mathematical sciences is a delightful resolution of an equation made up of squares and straight lines, curves and circles, civil architecture and wilful suburbia. It has a feet-on-the-ground, head-in-the-clouds quality that matches and mirrors the exact yet ever questing world of mathematics itself.

The centre was built in three phases. The cosmology, pure maths and statistics pavilions together with the central core were completed in 2000, followed by the circular Betty and Gordon Moore Library, in 2001, home of the Stephen Hawking Archive. The remainder has just been completed. The decision to build seven pavilions rather than one large building was not simply that the latter would have needed to be very big indeed, but because funds had to be raised in piecemeal fashion. Form, as many architects have come to experience, follows finance.

Here though, both form and function are imaginative and generous. The buildings are designed to work in ways that allow dons, researchers and students both private study space and places to meet and exchange ideas. Cullinan's practice has long and broad experience in the design of university buildings. As Robin Nicholson, one of Cullinan's partners, says: "Cambridge colleges have traditionally been made up of students and dons from many disciplines, so theoretically, everyone should gain from learning something of their colleagues' research. This is much the same spirit we've tried to design into the mathematics centre. We hope the layout of the buildings and the way they work will actively encourage fresh dialogue and discovery."

The individual buildings are particularly friendly in terms of design. Each is almost, if not quite, domestic in scale. Users have a high degree of personal control over their working environment, and the buildings are designed to stay warm in winter and cool in summer, with very low running costs. Offices inside the pavilions are gathered around seminar, coffee and meeting rooms; these spill out into the central court, and create a natural progress from very private to very public spaces.

The whole complex is gained through a circular gatehouse. Beyond the porters, it opens up into a wedge-like vista of pavilions, each set at a slight angle to the next, so that they appear to dance, gently, in the summer sun. The central building with its barn-like restaurant has a grass roof, so that the grounds here appear to be stepped or layered. Cars are not allowed to intrude; they are tucked neatly in small lots outside the central space and will eventually be shaded and hidden by trees.

The buildings are generously planned, thoughtfully finished and well detailed throughout. I particularly liked the restaurant with its ribbed concrete roof, a whale's belly of a space lit subtlely from small roof lights and low-set windows. Deep eaves and other forms of architectural sunblinds keep dazzle at bay wherever you go. Here is a set of buildings that borrows from the best of traditional university college design while creating new spaces designed to make life and ideas flow from one pavilion to another.

Last month, the centre won one of the prime minister's awards for public-building design. This is a good thing, but one to be considered. Too many public buildings in Britain today are designed and built hastily to suit the absurdities of the government's private finance initiative (PFI) whereby private companies build our public world to tight timetables and tighter budgets, and the public sector pays the private sector back for this dubious privilege. The result has been a spate of second-rate public buildings that will be worth very little - indeed, they may well be liabilities - in 25 years' time.

Good public buildings, whether hospitals, schools, housing or university departments, need to be designed carefully and built well. It took Cullinan's architects three years to get the design of the centre for mathematical sciences right, and it shows. Not only have the architects come up with a design that local residents and users are by and large happy with, they have discovered a fresh and convincing way of building enjoyably and well in England's favourite home, suburbia. This could only have been achieved by thorough and patient research. As with science and mathematics, so with architecture.