The Future of the University

Yesterday I had to give a last-minute talk to the occupiers of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, very much the University of London's vanguard for the last few years. I had to come up with something to talk about in about ten minutes, so spoke about the politics of University architecture. I wish I'd spoken about the malevolent student housing developers Unite, but what I did end up talking about centred on the suburbanisation of University Campuses, meaning that any protest that occurs in one can be easily localised and contained, and has difficulty appealing outside of its campus - Middlesex is a great example of this. But an even better example is Jiaotong University in Shanghai. The original campus of this University, in some 1910s and 50s buildings, can be seen above - right in the heart of the city, highly visible and tied into its fabric, albeit reached through easily closed gates. Now, the Chinese government has reasons to be chary about students' public presence. The University recently built a gigantic new campus right on the edges of Shanghai. To reach it, you must take one metro line to its terminus, then take another metro line almost to its terminus, then a cab. You arrive at this:

A telling alignment of Calatravan infrastructure and a ceremonial reminder of the presence of Expo 2010. Many students are enlisted as volunteers to escort people around the Expo. Architecturally, this giant new campus is the inverse to the Expo's deliberate spectacle, and in terms of planning it's astonishingly low-density, spacious - a shocking contrast with the hyper-dense centre, with one single high-rise as part of the complex. Here, too, there's little of the riotous kitsch (be it neoclassical or Futurist) that marks much Shanghai architecture - instead, much of it has a sobriety and tectonic rigour that is almost Brutalist. A Hannes Meyer would have recognised this - the first building you see as you enter the campus - as a Modernism rather separate from that of the Bund:

All around are the gigantic expressways, here in their less pretty exurban version, and one of them actually traverses the campus. We were told that this would soon be replaced with a tunnel, but it adds an interestingly dystopian aspect to an otherwise very clean and shiny place - and is surrounded by an interestingly unplanned expanse of scrub and waste.

Just next to it is some graffiti, one of those 'informal' art forms that some get very excited about, but by contrast with the wasteland behind it, it seems remarkably directed - the most polite graffiti imaginable, most of it in English - jolly, unthreatening, a way of enlivening the otherwise worrying view of a University being something cars travel over.

One of the academics at Jiaotong's aesthetics department described the halls of residence below to me as 'Stalinist', and I'm not sure whether he was referring to their Khrushchevian prefabrication or the more Sotsrealist use of pitched roofs and decoration; but either way, it's clear that the curiously Stalinian turn of architecture under Chinese neoliberalism has not gone unnoticed. But note, again, that they're in a totally CIAM landscape, a series of blocks in parkland, with lots of light, air, openness, although not all that much protection from the humidity for anyone walking round taking pictures.

That entrance isn't really the showpiece of the Jiaotong campus. That would be this:

This is what sticks in my memory when I think of Jiaotong. The nearest comparison for anyone British, and one provided by John Baldwin, one of our party, is Milton Keynes. A grid, with wide, wide roads, wide plazas-cum-pavements, and buildings that are equally minimal and cubic, and almost entirely low-rise. It's a non-place urban realm, then. What is different is the design language used throughout, which is mostly red brick and red tile, with a couple of excursions into white-rendered concrete. As said, in places it almost seems Brutalist, in the original truth to materials and walkways sense. It all has a rectitude which feels very, very un-Shanghai. But controlled as it might be, there are things here which are not wholly determined by the logic of domination.

There's an enjoyment of walkways and projections which is quite seductive, and has the very sensible functional purpose of screening from the atrocious heat.

Much of this place - with major exceptions, which we'll come to - is determined by some very high modernist notions of good taste. I'm told that the tension above between rectilinearity and curves was determined by traditional Chinese aesthetics and notions of balance, but it seems equally likely that they saw some Vesnin brothers buildings in a textbook. In fact, there's a fair bit of Constructivism here, as we shall see - but the most memorable buildings are the quasi-Brutalist teaching blocks.

These teaching buildings are marked by their circulation - a rather unexpected, for this profoundly disconnected city, streets-in-the-sky, deck-access approach. Off the decks are the classrooms. The circulation is the main expression on the elevations, again in an impressively rigorous, high modernist manner, as if this sort of consistency could only be tested out on the outskirts, away from the centre with all of its architectural (and perhaps social) irrationalism and unpredictability.

In the ground floor entrances, everything is buffed to a stunning sheen, squeaking with cleanliness. Bubble-shaped lightwells at a slight hint of CGI whimsy, but it's on a very minor level. If this is the future of the university, it's not worrying for purely architectural reasons, as here there is, in fact, at least some application here of the ideas in modernism which were not solely devoted to spectacle and Entertainment. It's more worrying because it's such an enclave - a whole new town, but a new town which could be closed off and locked down with the greatest of ease.

That said, there was no doubt here that I would have to completely rewrite everything I had to say in order to make even a modicum of sense here. Initially, assuming that because of the architectural press' China obsession that I'd be speaking to a group of kids who discussed Bjarke Ingels over their tofu and would already know everything I was going to say backwards, I had planned a precis of the Psuedomodernism stuff from book and blog. When we found out that Jane Eyre was the scheduled film for Jiatong's UK Cultural Week, we realised some changes would have to be made...Near to the lecture theatre was this:

If anyone wants to translate for me.

No hammer and sickles were detected as part of this building, but it is strikingly Soviet, in the Constructivist sense - all red-painted steel and De Stijl-like geometric complexities, the most sculptural and dramatic moment in a campus which could clearly care less otherwise about being sculptural and dramatic. Its projections and cantilevers greatly enliven the riverside path through the campus.

There was an Expo-associated campaign to do away with this kind of English-ish signage. Which would be a shame...

The comparison which is pretty unavoidable in a place like this is the business park, that embodiment of the decentring and disurbanising of capital, and some of the buildings are more business parkish than others. This certainly is:

Three identical blocks with a strange combination of Mendelsohnian ribbon windows and 'stone' detailing, they're a reminder that it's incredibly difficult here to demarcate architectural history into modernism, postmodernism, psuedomodernism, as I was planning to do to the Jiaotong students - because here you can see all three being employed all at once, with - typically - no apparent sense of contradiction. Elsewhere, this becomes even more obvious:

First of all, notice the neo-Chinese vernacular bridge. These bridges, complete with Victorianesque lamp standards, run through the entire complex, including those parts of it which are otherwise notable for their redbrick modernist consistency; but it would be hard to imagine the two being considered here as part of separate political-aesthetic moments. What is particularly striking is the neo-Victorian block behind, with its Bundish clock tower. You could imagine the whole thing in the UK in the early '90s, although without the clipped, machinic detail that gives the whole campus a sense of cleanliness and precision that British Modernism (or pomo) has never been able to muster. Maybe there's a hint of Aldo Rossi too about this place, in the sense of timelessness - not 'timeless' as in classic, but timeless as in 'where am I? What decade is this? Why has everything gone so quiet?'

This plaque doesn't quite provide an explanation.

Chinese Universities have, according to some accounts, been keen to eliminate some of the more dubiously Enlightenment subjects, with talk about doing away with Philosophy departments altogether. Perhaps, when our neoliberal educational consultants talk of the new, vocational, helps-you-get-a-job and stops-you-having-any-funny-ideas University, it's somewhere like the outer-suburban campus of Jiaotong that they're thinking of. If so, it's worth pondering for a while this scene of emptiness and exile.

Earlier Shanghai posts that would otherwise fall down the back of the sofa: One, Two and Three. Next up: The Expo.