GREAT DANE Founded in 1962, St Catherine’s is Oxford’s youngest and largest college. It caused a stir when it appointed Arne Jacobsen, a Dane, to design its buildings rather than a British architect, but the decision was a success. Nikolaus Pevsner referred to it as the perfect piece of architecture while Reyner Banham approvingly called it the best motel in Oxford.
Built on a marshy site on the outskirts of the city centre, the college consists of two parallel, three-storey residential blocks with covered arcades plus four separate blocks containing common rooms, dining hall, library and lecture rooms running north to south between them. There is also a master’s house on the other side of a river, and a separate music room.
In 1993, the college was one of the first post-war buildings to be given Grade I listed status.
Chosen by Rab and Denise Bennetts of Bennetts Associates
Rab Bennetts
"We first came here in 1975 when we were studying at the Edinburgh College of Art. We had a year out working in London and decided to spend our last weekend before heading back to Edinburgh sprinting around Oxford and Cambridge looking at new buildings such as St Catherine’s College and ABK’s Keble College. St Catherine’s turned out to have a lasting influence on our career. It’s all done with restraint, the minimum number of elements and materials, with everything beautifully executed. It’s extraordinarily refined. Jacobsen showed you don’t need to show off to get recognition.
None of the buildings are shouting for attention. They work as an ensemble with the exterior spaces, unlike a lot of modern architecture that tends to be designed as free-standing objects rather than as a backdrop. Here, the spatial composition relies on symmetry – apart from the bell tower and the off-centre cedar tree in the central green.
The buildings follow a strict module and have a clarity of repetition. There’s the danger that this might be boring but it certainly isn’t. The façade of each building is closed off in a different way – one is clad all the way down, one is open with a brise-soleil, another closed with brick. It’s very Miesian but with a Scandinavian sensibility.
There is a real craftsmanship in Jacobsen’s architecture which we revel in and aspire to, a finesse in details that takes ages to work out well. Nowadays, there seems to be a polarisation between fine art and craft in architecture, but the craft element – really understanding how you make a building – should be considered far more.
With a bit of experience as an architect, you realise that each job probably has one killer detail that defines the quality of the whole, and in this case it’s the relationship between column, beam, glazing and roof. Here, an architect at the peak of his powers has had the foresight to work out and really craft these details. Each component has complete clarity, which gives each major room or assembly an integrity that is sadly lacking in so much current skin-deep architecture.
Jacobsen was a regionalist. He was clearly aware of Oxford’s traditional quad colleges and very keen to absorb that in his design – he asked for plans of all the colleges to be sent over to Copenhagen when he was designing it. What’s particularly inventive is how the rigid formality begins to break down as you move out at the ends. The main quad space turns into a sequence of gardens enclosed by freestanding masonry walls infilled with hedges of yew trees, implying a cloister.
This is my favourite part of the whole college. The door to the senior common rooms is a panel of wood with glass panes on either side. This matches the size of the canopy that cantilevers from the walls. The design isn’t purely functional. Jacobsen kept the canopy away from the edges of the walkway. Everything is so light. It’s sublime. It’s an architectural landscape completely supportive of the building.
The integrity of the architecture runs throughout all the buildings. Everything is so complete, right down to the tapestry and the furniture, ceramics and cutlery in the dining room, which he designed as well. It is patronage of the highest order, not only commissioning it, but looking after it so well for 50 years."
Denise Bennetts
"St Catherine’s was the first new-build college in Oxford for centuries. Even now, it’s the only college campus that isn’t closed off at night. It isn’t a contained quad. The whole Jacobsen grid loosens and fragments towards the margins. He gets around a lot of the problems of traditional quads – such as how you go around the corner – by having these separate elements of building and landscape. This integration of landscape is quite three-dimensional, with external rooms formed with yew hedges.
It’s fascinating to see photographs from the sixties of the canopy with the tiny yew trees before they’ve grown. He had the vision for what it would be like in years to come whereas nowadays, mature trees would be brought in. There is something satisfying about a building maturing and growing rather than springing up fully formed.
Jacobsen shows that geometric repetition is no enemy to creating a sensitive building. Instead, it can be a mechanism for orchestrating things in a poetic way. At St Catherine’s’ there is a real clarity of construction, with a simple articulation of frame and infill, with every element acknowledging the presence of its partners. The language of Jacobsen’s architecture has a sense of buildability about it, which we like.
Jacobsen taught us how to look at the details, which are here infused with the character of the materials. The brickwork is wonderful. He wanted to use a lighter coloured brick that would reflect the light more but there was uncertainty over whether the order could be met, so in the end he used a British brick but with reduced height to mimic the proportions of Continental bricks. Everything was designed to the brick module so there are no odd cut bricks anywhere.
Jacobsen took everything down to the last detail, playing with the same few materials to create different effects in each space, whether in the exceptional volume of the dining hall or the smaller common rooms. In the senior common room, for example, everything is more intimate with elements of asymmetry in particular spaces to define where principal activities are to take place. These subliminal messages are still being heeded and are preferable to the story that Jacobsen wanted some carpets woven with dots to show where to position chairs.
Despite the size of the building, it has a wonderful domestic scale both inside and out. I think one of the best ways to appreciate it is to study the ground plan with the buildings and the landscape determined by the same 3 metre grid. It results in an intensity of internal and external spaces but always with the respite of the open aspect to the south and north."
Buxton, Pamela, 50 Architects 50 Buildings: The Buildings That Inspire Architects, Batsford, 2016
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