{"title":"The University of Nonstop Society: Campus Planning, Lounge Space, and Incessant Productivity","authors":"Samuel Austin, A. Sharr","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1766300","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The University of Birmingham, UK, has been at the forefront of the last decade’s marketization of higher education in England. It has invested massively in its estate, and we examine the ideologies at work in its new masterplan and architecture. We account for the campus’s history. We then review the idea of lounge space – around which it has been reconfigured – and focus on three projects: The Alan Walters Building, a new Library, and the so-called Green Heart. We examine the ideological outlook of the campus and its new architecture to draw conclusions about the ideas of contemporary society and economy that they represent. The trajectory of its masterplanning and architecture inscribe a shift from a postwar liberal view of higher education to a contemporary marketized one under the economic, social and cultural condition characterized as neoliberalism. It now constitutes what we call the university of nonstop society.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":"69 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2020-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1766300","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Architecture and Culture","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1766300","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ARCHITECTURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
Abstract The University of Birmingham, UK, has been at the forefront of the last decade’s marketization of higher education in England. It has invested massively in its estate, and we examine the ideologies at work in its new masterplan and architecture. We account for the campus’s history. We then review the idea of lounge space – around which it has been reconfigured – and focus on three projects: The Alan Walters Building, a new Library, and the so-called Green Heart. We examine the ideological outlook of the campus and its new architecture to draw conclusions about the ideas of contemporary society and economy that they represent. The trajectory of its masterplanning and architecture inscribe a shift from a postwar liberal view of higher education to a contemporary marketized one under the economic, social and cultural condition characterized as neoliberalism. It now constitutes what we call the university of nonstop society.
期刊介绍:
Architecture and Culture, the international award winning, peer-reviewed journal of the Architectural Humanities Research Association, investigates the relationship between architecture and the culture that shapes and is shaped by it. Whether culture is understood extensively, as shared experience of everyday life, or in terms of the rules and habits of different disciplinary practices, Architecture and Culture asks how architecture participates in and engages with it – and how both culture and architecture might be reciprocally transformed. Architecture and Culture publishes exploratory research that is purposively imaginative, rigorously speculative, visually and verbally stimulating. From architects, artists and urban designers, film-makers, animators and poets, from historians of culture and architecture, from geographers, anthropologists and other social scientists, from thinkers and writers of all kinds, established and new, it solicits essays, critical reviews, interviews, fictional narratives in both images and words, art and building projects, and design hypotheses. Architecture and Culture aims to promote a conversation between all those who are curious about what architecture might be and what it can do.