|
Dr Alan Marcus (University of Aberdeen) | |
| In
1969, a new Cambridge college opened as a centre for advanced study
promoting a socially integrated environment for postgraduate students,
visiting fellows and a small number of permanent fellows. In selecting
the designer for this utopian vision, the founders of Clare Hall chose
the Swedish architect, Ralph Erskine, who had a reputation for using
architecture to promote greater social equality. In keeping with the theme of ‘the Future University’, I propose to investigate how the original ambition of creating a new physical paradigm for a scholarly community has matured 40 years on. My principal means of doing so is through the methodological application of observational film to document the college’s architectural structures and use of space. In addition, a monograph is planned, On Erskine’s Doorstep, which will explore the design and use of the new college within the context of the architect’s other work. As a cultural historian and film practitioner, I see practice-as-research as a valuable tool for examining spatial dynamics and modes of human behaviour within the built environment. The study is informed by my experience as a graduate of Clare College (M Phil, 1990, PhD 1994), whose fellows had the foresight to found the new postgraduate college, and as a Member and former Visiting Fellow of Clare Hall (2001). In 1992 and 2001, I also conducted interviews with Ralph Erskine (1914-2005) about his work. This research on Clare Hall forms part of a larger study related to its unique design, which had its genesis in a scheme Erskine initially devised for an Arctic community. A specialist in cold weather architecture, Ralph Erskine reconfigured his design four times, including for a new mining town in the early-1960s in Svappavaara, located above the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden, and another new town at Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island in the Canadian Arctic archipelago in the late-1960s. Ironically, both these projects were abandoned by their government funders after a single apartment building was constructed. While Erskine was unable to realize his bold plans for a socially integrated Arctic community in which indigenous and transient personnel would cohabitate, he was able to reconfigure it below the Arctic Circle as both a Cambridge college and as a massive council housing project in the early-1970s in Newcastle, known as the Byker estate. Research for this project has been on-going, with fieldwork conducted at Resolute Bay which resulted in a monograph (Relocating Eden, 1995), and filming at Svappavaara in 2007, prior to plans to demolish Erskine’s lone apartment building. The project includes making four observational 30-minute films at the four locations outlined above, including Cambridge, which would take the final form of a DVD accompanying the monograph. This work corresponds to my research on visual representations of the built environment, as explored in the book, Visualizing the City (2007, Routlege), which I co-edited, and my current Carnegie Trust-funded project, In Time of Place (www.abdn.ac.uk/timeofplace). | |
