St Catz was founded as the non-collegiate St Catherine's Society
in 1868, to serve locally based undergraduates who could not afford
to live in college and remained without undergraduate accommodation
until 1962, when the first of a new set of college buildings opened.
The college, which was completed in 1964, was the brainchild of
Alan Bullock, formerly Censor of St Catherine's Society and then
Founding Master of St Catherine's College, who led the campaign
to raise money for the new buildings. These were designed by Arne
Jacobsen - his appointment without even a competition caused an
outrage in Oxford. However, Lord Bullock and his team had visited
new buildings that were going up in Britain in the late 1950s
and, seeing none that they liked, had visited Denmark to see work
by Vilhelm Wohlert, Jacobsen, CF Moller and Jorn Utzon. It was
Jacobsen's design of the Munkegard School in Vangede and of Rodovre
Town Hall that led to his appointment. His first action was to
ask for plans of all the colleges in Oxford.
The new college was built on a 3 m grid that was applied as rigorously
to its landscape as to its buildings, and was uncompromisingly
modern in its architecture. Two long blocks containing two floors
of undergraduate accommodation, above Fellows sets and other facilities
face each other across an enormous quadrangle which is completed
by the Hall, senior common rooms, junior common rooms, kitchens
and offices on one side, and the Wolfson Library and Bernard Sunley
Lecture Theatre on the other. The library and lecture theatre
are separated by an asymetrically placed bell tower.
Beyond these are the Music House, the squash courts and gym, the
former situated very close to a medieval water mill belonging
to Magdalen College. The mill stream (in effect, a tributary of
the River Cherwell) marks the western boundary of the St Catz
site, and land around the mill marks the southern boundary. The
eastern and northern boundaries are marked by playing fields belonging
to Merton College.
The tight constraints on the St Catz site are important because,
in Jacobsen's design, the western-facing accommodation block also
contains the original entrance to the college with its Porter's
Lodge facing a narrow moat, beyond which is a long lawn. At the
northern end are the Master's Lodgings and beyond that garages,
a circular bicycle shed and the octagonal Music House, the only
non-rectangular building in Jacobsen's design. But, because there
are privately owned houses on the other side of the mill stream
in Manor Place, people going to St Catz could never walk straight
into the Porter's Lodge as they do in most Oxford colleges which
face the street. Instead, they reached the entrance from Manor
Road by crossing a small bridge over the mill stream and then
turned right, passing garages, the bicycle shed and the Master's
Lodgings before turning left to reach the Porter's Lodge via another
bridge over the moat. This situation has now changed.
As Jacobsen's buildings are on land, which at one time had been
subjected to flooding, he put them on a tabula rasa - a foundation
that echoed Mies van der Rohe's ideas, and in Oxford, Mies's influence
on Jacobsen is quite clear. Some time after Jacobsen's buildings
were completed, there was an opportunity to add new buildings
to the north - the Alan Bullock and Mary Sunley buildings designed
by Jack Lankester, the surveyor to the university (in effect,
the university's architect) who had worked with Jacobsen. Sir
Philip Manning Dowson was also called in to improve the spaces
around the entrance to the college.
However, the acquisition of further land from Merton College,
situated immediately to the north of the lane that runs from Manor
Road to Merton's playing fields to the east, has given St Catz
the opportunity to build three sides of a second quadrangle facing
the Alan Bullock and Mary Sunley Buildings. The first (western)
side of the quadrangle was completed in 1995. The northern and
eastern sides of the quadrangle have just been finished.
The purpose of the second quadrangle is to provide a further 129
rooms so that St Catz can now provide accommodation for 80% of
its 330 undergraduates. It can also accommodate 15 postgraduates
elsewhere in the city. There is a separate block at the eastern
end of the quadrangle known as the Arumugam Building (which is
diagonally opposite a modern punt house that is set at an angle
between the western and northern blocks) that contains the relocated
Porter's Lodge on the ground floor and seminar suites on the two
floors above. The Arumugam Building is visually different from
its neighbours because it is fitted with exterior louvres that
reflect those fitted to the Bernard Sunley Lecture Theatre.
What distinguishes the new quadrangle, designed by Hodder Associates,
is that it echoes but is noticeably different from Jacobsen's
residential blocks. Additionally, because the western side is
staggered to follow the line of the mill stream (and in fact is
set at 30 degrees to Jacobsen's grid), the composition introduces
a variety of different angles to the right angles that dominate
Jacobsen's composition. It is as if someone had followed Mondrian's
rules by keeping the straight lines but arranging them on a slant.
Hodder's residential blocks retain the full-height wall glazing
seen in Jacobsen's residential blocks, as well as the narrow (Roman)
buff-coloured bricks with their immaculate layering. (In Jacobsen's
day, Danish brickies were brought in to teach Oxford brickies
how to lay a straight course and several walls were torn down
and rebuilt.) The buildings are on concrete piles and have a greyish-white
concrete frame with concrete slabs used for the ceilings and concrete
tiles or light grey carpets on the floors. Steel frames secure
the glazing, which is used together with fixed aluminium panels,
but unlike Jacobsen's blocks, double glazing is used and incorporates
venetian blinds. (This had been Jacobsen's original intention
but cost limitations set by the - then - University Grants Committee
forced him to use single glazing and net curtains. Both are now
being replaced.) The rooms are furnished with Jacobsen's Series
7 chairs, and desks and wardrobes by Hodder Associates which,
together with the panelling used in parts of the buildings, are
in maple. The Porter's Lodge has a long, maple reception desk
and a new, low-backed version of Jacobsen's Oxford chair which
has recently been introduced by furniture manufacturer, Fritz
Hansen.
In designing the new buildings, Hodder Associates followed Jacobsen
in keeping to the Oxford tradition of having sets of rooms off
communal stairs (instead of rooms off corridors along each floor)
and, as with Jacobsen's design, each staircase is provided with
small pantries intended to be used for making tea, coffee and
light refreshments. However, undergraduates no longer have to
eat regularly in Hall (in the 1950s, St Catz undergraduates had
to dine in Hall three times a week where they wore gowns and were
waited on by college servants). Indeed, so casual has life become
that Hall serves buffet meals and a notice reminds everyone that
they must wear shoes! But the change in lifestyle means that many
undergraduates now cook their own meals - and the pantries are
inadequate for this. So it could be argued that an opportunity
has been missed to bring the catering facilities in the new residential
blocks up to date.
In one other respect, however, the new quadrangle is in keeping
with the 21st century: it is the only one in Oxford to provide
purposely designed car parking. Gone are the days when only the
rich undergraduates and a few dons owned cars, and the closure
of streets in the centre of the city and park-and-ride facilities
on the outskirts attempt to deal with a major urban problem. The
part of the quadrangle set aside for cars will be screened by
cut privet trees which is just one of the latest developments
of the policy to integrate St Catz's buildings with their landscape.
In Jacobsen's original design, the idea was to use the lawns and
trees to bring out his immaculate brickwork, so the overall colour
scheme was based on browns and greens and the college was offset
by many unusual trees - a cedar of Lebanon in the quadrangle plus
Judas, Indian, strawberry and mulberry trees, Douglas firs and
weeping conifers (among others) in other parts of the gardens.
The mill stream, of course, has its willows. There are also areas
in which the 3 m grid is marked out by yew hedges. However, as
time has gone by the gardens have become more English, with herbaceous
borders planted in the Fellows' garden, for example, and colour
added elsewhere.
The completion of the second quadrangle, however, means that there
is a chance to create a new entrance to St Catz by creating a
roundabout (probably defined by a St Catherine's wheel in brick)
in the lane close to the Porter's Lodge. Furthermore, by removing
a wall and a beech tree adjacent to the Mary Sunley Building and
sowing a lawn in front of the eastern buildings of the new quadrangle,
a visual link will be established with the lawn between the moat
and the Master's Lodgings. In this way, it is hoped to link Jacobsen's
buildings and Hodder Associates' additions more closely together,
despite their being separated by the lane leading to Merton's
playing fields.
Richard Carr
Richard Carr graduated from St Catz in 1959, after which he watched Jacobsen's buildings going up with great interest.