A creative solution to “The problem of shelter”: photographs of a university campus on an air base 1948–1969

ABSTRACT

Universities exert effort and expense in designing buildings to fit the current ontology and meet the perceived needs of society. This is not new – historically, entire campuses were designed to manifest pedagogical and social ideals, like the “academical village” (Coulson, Roberts and Taylor, 2015) of Thomas Jefferson’s imagination.¹

¹ Jonathan Coulson, Paul Roberts, and Isabelle Taylor, University Planning and Architecture: The Search for Perfection (Routledge: Abingdon, 2015), 16.

Yet many campuses evolve through less deliberate means, repurposing existing sites and structures. This paper analyses one such site: a campus formed post-war when a disused air force base was adapted to house an expanding School of Engineering 1948–1969. The article takes an image-led approach, analysing a series of photographs found in an institutional archive which capture the final years of this temporary, repurposed university campus. Visual sources like these encourage reflection on material and spatial dimensions of institutional histories, enlarging our understanding of the relationship between place and knowledge, things and ideas. The images of this campus also make a case for “making do” in the university – highlighting the creative possibilities for transient sites and repurposing existing built structures.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-war university
• campus
• material history
• photographs
• engineering

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Jonathan Coulson, Paul Roberts, and Isabelle Taylor, University Planning and Architecture: The Search for Perfection (Routledge: Abingdon, 2015), 16.

² Kingston, Reynolds, and Thom, “School of Engineering,” Home and Building (November 1963): 58–9.

³ Sheldon Rothblatt, The Modern University and its Discontents: The Fate of Newman’s Legacies in Britain and America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 101.

⁴ Judith Bassett, Prospero’s Island: A History of the School of Engineering at the University of Auckland. (Auckland: School of Engineering, University of Auckland, 2003).

⁵ Kingston, Reynolds, and Thom, “School of Engineering,” 59.

⁶ Hannah Forsyth, A History of the Modern Australian University (Sydney: New South Publishing, 2014), 35.

⁷ Kingston, Reynolds and Thom, “School of Engineering”.

⁸ Anthony Ossa-Richardson, “The Idea of a University and its Concrete Form,” The Physical University: Contours of Space and Place in Higher Education, ed. Philip Temple (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 131–58; Jonathan Coulson, Paul Roberts and Isabelle Taylor, University Planning and Architecture: The Search for Perfection (Routledge: Abingdon, 2015); Tony Birks, Building the New Universities (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1972).

⁹ Keith Sinclair, A History of the University of Auckland 1883–1983 (Auckland: University of Auckland Press & Oxford University Press, 1983); Bassett, Prospero’s Island; Judith Bassett, The School of Engineering University of Auckland 1906–1969: A History (Auckland: University of Auckland, 1969).

¹⁰ The concept of “incident places” comes from architecture theory. See Francesca Lanz, “Perspective Re-Inhabiting. Thoughts on the Contribution of Interior Architecture to Adaptive Intervention: People, Places and Identities,” Journal of Interior Design 43, no. 2 (2018): 3.

¹¹ Bassett, School of Engineering; Prospero’s Island.

¹² Michela Bassanelli and Gennaro Postiglione, “Active-Actions Strategies. Adaptive Reuse Come Processo di Riattivazioni Sostenibili,” Re-Cycle 03 – Viaggio in Italia, ed. Sara Marini and Enza Santangelo (Aracne: Rome, 2013), 155.

¹³ Ian Grosvenor and Gyӧngyvér Pataki, “Learning Through Culture: Seeking ‘Critical Case Studies of Possibilities’ in the History of Education,” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 3 (2017): 246–67.

¹⁴ Ossa-Richardson, “The Idea of a University.”

¹⁵ Frances Kelly, “‘Man Sorting Books’: Historical Research an Archive of University Photographs,” History of Education 48, no.1 (2019): 99–117.

¹⁶ The identity of the photographer/s cannot be definitively ascertained for all these images, although some are (like Figur 3) attributed to Anton Estie. Estie was employed by the university but he was not an engineer nor was he based at Ardmore: he was a visitor to and observer of this place.

¹⁷ Ian Grosvenor, Martin Lawn, Antόnio Nόvoa, Kate Rousmaniere, and Harry Smaller, “Debate: Reading Educational Spaces: The Photographs of Paulo Catrica,” Paedagogica Historica 40, no. 3, (2004): 318, 325. Pat Thomson also considers how photographs are representations as well as evidence and that interpretation shifts with the viewer, in “The Photograph as Witness,” in Education, Childhood and Anarchism: Talking Colin Ward, ed. Catherine Burke and Ken Jones (Routledge, 2014), 157–72. This approach has contiguities with Fay Gasparini and Malcolm Vick’s account of a college library which attends to both the materiality of the place and to symbolic dimensions in “Place (Material, Metaphorical, Symbolic) in Education History: The Townsville College of Advanced Education Library Resource Centre, 1974–1981,” History of Education 37, no. 1 (2008): 141–62.

¹⁸ David Orr, “Place and Pedagogy,” The NAMTA Journal 38, no. 1 ([1992]/2013): 183–188.

¹⁹ Trevor Barnes and Carl Christian Abrahamsson, “The Imprecise Wanderings of a Precise Idea: The Travels of Spatial Analysis,” in Mobilities of Knowledge, ed. Heike Jöns, Peter Meusburger, and Michael Heffernan (Springer, 2017), 105–21.

²⁰ Bassett, Prospero’s Island.

²¹ Derek R. Ford, Education and the Production of Space: Political Pedagogy, Geography and Urban Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2017), 104, 101. See also Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 33.

²² There are connections here with the concept of adaptive reuse in architecture theory which gives “new life to an existing building or structure through a new function” and is a practice promoting sustainability and the maintenance of a city’s built identity that emerges over time. As an architectural practice it counters a tendency within a neoliberal economy to use resources and energy “carelessly”. See Deniz Ozge Aytac, Tulin Vural Arslan, and Selen Durak, “Adaptive Reuse as a Strategy Toward Urban Resilience,” European Journal of Sustainable Development 5, no. 4 (2016): 524.

²³ Research analysing the current ontology of the “business” university and its expression in architecture includes Sean Sturm and Stephen Turner, “‘Built Pedagogy’: The University of Auckland Business School as Crystal Palace,” Interstices 12 (2011): 23–34.

²⁴ Rothblatt, The Modern University, 105.

²⁵ Cyril Firth, Oral History Interview, 27 November 2001, Engineering Oral Histories by Patsy Hulse, Faculty of Engineering/University of Auckland Library.

²⁶ Sinclair, A History of the University of Auckland.

²⁷ Ibid., 114–17.

²⁸ Bassett, School of Engineering, 10–11.

²⁹ Parliamentary Consultative Committee Report, Education, Training, and Supply of Professional Engineers in New Zealand, AJHR 1949, H-39 (hereafter “Education, Training, and Supply of Engineers”).

³⁰ Bassett, School of Engineering.

³¹ Education, Training, and Supply of Engineers, 42.

³² Bassett, Prospero’s Island, 59–60.

³³ The report describes the School as, in the “Words of an eminent visiting English engineer”, “a disgrace to the city and to the University”: Education, Training, and Supply of Engineers, 41.

³⁴ Sinclair, History of the University of Auckland.

³⁵ Bassett, School of Engineering.

³⁶ Louise Shaw, Making a Difference: A History of the Auckland College of Education 1881–2004 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006).

³⁷ Maxine Stephenson, “‘Making Do’: The Politics and Pragmatics of the Use of Temporary Spaces in New Zealand Schools,” History of Education Review 32, no. 2 (2003), 24.

³⁸ Steven Cowan, Gary McCulloch, and Tom Woodin, “From HORSA Huts to ROSLA Blocks: The School Leaving Age and the School Building Programme in England, 1943–1972,” History of Education 41, no. 3 (2012), 361–80.

³⁹ Education, Training, and Supply of Engineers, 17, 12, 18.

⁴⁰ As long as the site was not considered permanent, plans were on hold: “One thing is certain: in order that planning may be properly carried out, and permanent buildings erected as soon as possible, a decision made to the future side should be made immediately”: Ibid., 24, 42.

⁴¹ Council minutes, 1949 (I), 73; quoted in Bassett, School of Engineering, 34.

⁴² Sinclair, History of the University of Auckland, 212, 248.

⁴³ Grosvenor et al., “Debate,” 320.

⁴⁴ M. Petrievich, “Hell Away from Home,” Craccum (University of Auckland, Thursday 17 July 1958): 3.

⁴⁵ Bassett, School of Engineering, 30.

⁴⁶ Aytac, Arslan, and Durak, in “Adaptive Reuse as a Strategy”, 527, list the elements of a building which cannot/can be changed in adaptive reuse architecture: the site and structure cannot, the space and “stuff” (furniture, equipment) can.

⁴⁷ Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 194–5.

⁴⁸ Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).

⁴⁹ Grosvenor et al., “Debate,” 320.

⁵⁰ Bassett, School of Engineering, 33–5. Craccum reported on the “uncertain future” of the School at Ardmore and the problems it created for the Engineers in Petrievich, “Hell Away from Home,” 3.

⁵¹ Council Minutes, 1958, 111, quoted in Bassett, School of Engineering, 41.

⁵² Leech’s interest in aeronautics and his connection with the defence forces solidified the School’s chances of pursuing this branch of engineering research, according to Bassett, Prospero’s Island.

⁵³ Ibid., 71.

⁵⁴ David Wade Chambers and Richard Gillespie, “Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge,” Osiris no. 15 (2001): 222.

⁵⁵ Ardmore was on the edge of a city, it was peripheral to the main university and to national centres of research activity, and it was distant from the Commonwealth centres of research activity. It was “multiply-layered periphery” like Henry Smaller’s school in Grosvenor et al., “Debate,” 329.

⁵⁶ The Air Department Report for the year 1948 identifies “aerial top-dressing” and “aeronautical research” among its priorities, and states that two RNZAF scholarship in aeronautical engineering were granted: Air Department, Report on the Air Department for the Year 1948–49, AJHR H-37, 3, 4, 11.

⁵⁷ Bassett, Prospero’s Island, 74.

⁵⁸ Sinclair, History of the University of Auckland, 253.

⁵⁹ Richard P. Dober, The New Campus in Britain: Ideas of Consequence for the United States (Educational Facilities Libraries: New York, 1965), 11.

⁶⁰ Rothblatt, The Modern University, 73–4.

⁶¹ Bassett, School of Engineering, 38.

⁶² “Representational spaces: space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’”: Lefebvre, Production of Space, 39.

⁶³ Bassett, Prospero’s Island, 97. See also Rob Aspden and Ray Ryan, Where Did They Go? A Collection of Biographic Notes of the Lives and Careers of the Ardmore Class of 1957–59 and Some Memories of Life at Ardmore (1957–59)(Auckland: Prepared for the Ardmore Class of 1957 reunion, 28–30 April 2000).

⁶⁴ “Rekindling the Ardmore Spirit,” New Zealand Engineering News (Tuesday 22 November 2016).

⁶⁵ Leech, Council Minutes, 1948 (2), 593; quoted in Bassett, School of Engineering, 31.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 33.

⁶⁷ Education, Training, and Supply of Engineers, 70: Recommendations 9, 10, 14.

⁶⁸ Orr, “Place and Pedagogy”, 183–4.

⁶⁹ “Rekindling the Ardmore Spirit”.

⁷⁰ Barnes and Abrahamsson, “Imprecise Wanderings,” 107.

⁷¹ Bassett, Prospero’s Island.

⁷² Barnes and Abrahamsson, “Imprecise Wanderings,” 108.

⁷³ M. Petrievich, “Activities Serious and Otherwise,” Craccum (Wednesday 4 June 1958): 6.

⁷⁴ Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité (1984): 3, 6–7.

⁷⁵ Bassett, Prospero’s Island, 99. Bassett gives the example of an experiment with a Luger pistol, shot to test how many walls it could penetrate: the result was nine.

⁷⁶ Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 6–7.

⁷⁷ Elizabeth Grosz, “The Thing,” in The Object Reader, ed. Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 125.

⁷⁸ Jennifer Kelly (née Brooke), a student at the Teacher’s College 1959–1960, recalls Engineering students blowing up a disused airplane husk in a field. Personal conversation with author, August, 2016. It wasn’t just the students: Bassett tells a story of Leech letting off a grenade to liven up a party that was a bit flat, destroying the windows of the nearby dorm: Bassett, Prospero’s Island, 63–4.

⁷⁹ Photographs of assemblages are found in other sources too: Aspden and Ryan, Where Did They Go?, 14, include one photograph of a “Mechanicow”, a cow-like structure made of found objects from 1958.

⁸⁰ Ian Black, quoted in Bassett, Prospero’s Island, 68.

⁸¹ Education, Training, and Supply of Engineers, 17, 16.

⁸² Grosz, “The Thing,” 128.

⁸³ Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Citadel Press, 1992), 209.

⁸⁴ Grosz, “The Thing,” 125.

⁸⁵ Education, Training, and Supply of Engineers, 7.

⁸⁶ Grosz, “The Thing,” 126.

⁸⁷ Education, Training, and Supply of Engineers, 31.

⁸⁸ Ibid., 31, 40. The report adds that “knowledge of the fundamental principles can be gained only within the atmosphere of a University”: ibid., 34.

⁸⁹ Catherine Burke, “Hands on History: Towards a Critique of the ‘Everyday,’” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 191–201; Grosvenor et al., “Reading Educational Spaces”; Kelly, “Man Sorting Books”.

⁹⁰ Aspden and Ryan, Where Did They Go?, 5.

⁹¹ Ibid.

⁹² Bassett, Prospero’s Island.

⁹³ Michael Fielding and Peter Moss, Radical Education and the Common School: A Democratic Alternative (Routledge: London, 2014), 9.

⁹⁴ Petrievich, “Hell Away from Home”; Roy Kozlovsky, “The Architectures of Childhood”, in The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2013), 129.

⁹⁵ Stuart Lester, “Play as Protest: Clandestine Moments of Disturbance and Hope,” Education, Childhood and Anarchism: Talking Colin Ward, ed. Catherine Burke and Ken Jones (London: Routledge, 2014), 204–5.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 205.

⁹⁷ “The considerable expansion of University buildings called for … is obviously outside the realms of possibility for some time to come”: Education, Training, and Supply of Engineers, 34.

⁹⁸ Ford, Education and the Production of Space.

⁹⁹ Barnes and Abrahamsson, “Imprecise Wanderings,” 108.

¹⁰⁰ The establishment of the Teacher’s College at Ardmore was likewise due to the resourcefulness of Clarence Beeby. “By taxing to the utmost the available facilities at the newly-opened residential college at Ardmore, as well as the other training colleges, it has been possible to accommodate the additional number of students.” Minister of Education, “Report”, 1949, AJHR E-1, 2.

¹⁰¹ Maria Tamboukou, “Of Other Spaces: Women’s Colleges at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century in the UK,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 7, no. 3 (2000): 250.

¹⁰² Aspden and Ryan, Where Did They Go?, 5. See also Peg Cummins, Learn, Teach, Serve: A History of Ardmore Teacher’s College (Bassdrum Books: Tauranga, 2008).

¹⁰³ Grosvenor et al., “Debate,” 320.

¹⁰⁴ “I use that word ‘table’ in two superimposed senses … the table where, for an instant, perhaps forever, the umbrella encounters the sewing machine; and also a table, a tabula, that enables thought to operate on the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences – the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space”: Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xviii.

¹⁰⁵ Minister of Education, “Report,” 3.

¹⁰⁶ Ӧzen Eyüce and Ahmet Eyüce, “Design Education for Adaptive Reuse,” Design Education: Explorations and Prospects for a Better Built Environment 4, nos 2–3 (2010): 419.

¹⁰⁷ Camille Boano, “Henri Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment,” The Journal of Architecture 20, no. 3 (2015): 544–9.

¹⁰⁸ Rothblatt, The Modern University, 101.

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Frances Kelly

Dr Frances Kelly is a Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies in Education at the University of Auckland / Te Whare Wananga O Tamaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand. Frances’ research spans higher education and the history of education, and recent work critically explores material practices and spatialities in educational contexts.