The Post-War University: Utopianist Campus and College

Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

"This book examines the period of stupendous new university building from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, in the USA and Canada, in France as well as in West Germany, with the 'English Seven' - Sussex, York, Essex, East Anglia, Lancaster, Kent and Warwick - taking centre stage." "There was a widely shared belief that good planning and distinguished architecture could bring forth not only academically mature, but also socially adjusted citizens. University presidents, vice chancellors and rectors passionately believed that they were providing innovative architecture of the highest quality, while the designers held that their planning not only served function and beauty, but could guarantee the new universities as ideal, as total environments. The optimal university should combine the bigness of the efficient Modernist campus with the intimacy of the old small college." "But this book is less concerned with a single utopian dream than with the complex stories of a great number of utopianist realities. It deals with the efforts as much as with the results, investigating the creation of institutions by charting the interaction of the diverse agendas of designers, educationalists, sociologists and politicians, tied, as they were, into each country's own traditions."--BOOK JACKET.

Stefan Muthesius teaches in the School of World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of many books and is coauthor with Miles Glendinning of Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, published by Yale University Press.