Corporation Takes Command: The Project of the Sir John Cass Faculty of Architecture and Design between Complicity and Resistance

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, Bill Readings compared universities to business corporations, sounding the alarm for an incipient corporatization of the academy that has provoked commentary since. Under neoliberalism, public universities are run as private corporations striving to survive in the increasingly competitive higher education market. The spatial side of this phenomenon is an architectural portfolio consisting of corporate style reception desks, turnstile-controlled entrances, bookable meeting rooms, and café spaces to learn. This article examines “the slow death” of the university as a space of scholarship focusing on the Sir John Cass Faculty of Architecture and Design (or Cass) in Central House (2012–17), London. As a public university acting like a real estate operator in a large metropolis, the Cass displays both complicity and resistance toward the managerial logics of universities. Its resistance lies in the architectural reconfiguration of Central House, which was eventually defeated by the institution’s real estate ambitions.

Keywords:

• academic buildings
• corporation
• learning landscapes
• learning machines
• the Cass
• neoliberalism
• social learning

Notes

1. See Derek Curtis Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

2. For exceptions see Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Labor and Architecture: Revisiting Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt,” Log 23 (2011): 97–118; Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Igea Troiani, “Academic Capitalism in Architecture Schools: A Feminist Critique of Employability, 24/7 Work and Entrepreneurship,” in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, ed. Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helen Runting (London: Routledge, 2017), 170–180.

3. Terry Eagleton, “The Slow Death of the University,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 6, 2015. https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-slow-death-of-the-university/ (accessed eptember 8, 2020); Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2016); Raewyn Connell, The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It Is Time for Radical Change (London: Zed Books, 2019); Michael Bailey and Des Freedman, The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance (London and New York: Pluto Press, 2011).

4. See Stefan Muthesius, The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College (London: Yale University Press, 2000); Francesco Zuddas, The University as Settlement Principle: Territorialising Knowledge in Late 1960s Italy (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020).

5. See Graham Walton and Graham Matthews (eds.), Exploring Informal Learning Space in the University: A Collaborative Approach (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018); Jonathan Coulson, Paul Robert and Isabelle Taylor, University Trends: Contemporary Campus Design (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).

6. For a catalogue of “academic commons,” see Xristina Argyros and Ryan Neiheiser (eds.), The School of Athens. No publisher: 2019.

7. See Jos Boys, Towards Creative Learning Spaces: Re-Thinking the Architecture of Post-Compulsory Education (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).

8. We did not have any particular association to the Cass. We knew some people teaching there and Domus magazine (for which we used to work) and its former director had strong ties with the school. We visited the building on the occasion of an end of year show. We started looking at it with more attention for an article. It was for that reason that Sabrina met Beigel and Christou, and interviewed them.

9. For coverage of the project in the architectural press, see Will Hunter, “London Schools Part Three: London Metropolitan,” Architectural Review 1396 (2013): 72–80; Adam Khan, “Studio City,” Architecture Today 234 (2013): 46–51; Ellis Woodman, “Rooms for Improvement,” Building Design 11 (2013): 10–13.

10. The Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design derived from the merging of the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Media and Design and the School of Architecture and Spatial Design.

11. For the role of time in ARU’s work, see Florian Beigel and Philip Christou, “An Art of Living,” Domus 973 (2013). Also available at https://www.domusweb.it/en/opinion/2014/02/27/an_art_of_living.html.

12. Florian Beigel and Philip Christou, interviewed by Sabrina Puddu, June 2017.

13. Florian Beigel and Philip Christou, “Designing the Rug and not the Picnic: Paju Landscape Script, Paju Book City, Seoul, Korea, 1999 – Present,” in Landscape Urbanism, A Manual for the Machinic Landscape, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi and Ciro Najle (London: AA Publications, 2003). See also Beigel and Christou, “An Art of Living.”

14. We visited Central House in June 2017.

15. http://aru.londonmet.ac.uk/works/cass/

16. Confirmation comes from the title of the project “Rebuilding the Cass. The Little City inside the Building” (2018–2019) by ARU, in collaboration with CIVA and the Kanal Foundation, which temporarily reassembled the partitions of Central House at Kanal Brut in Brussels. See Fabrizio Gallanti, “A Show of Brut Strength,” Kvadrat Interwoven, http://kvadratinterwoven.com/a-show-of-brut-strength (accessed May 27, 2020).

17. See Florian Beigel and Philip Christou, Translations (Basel: Verlag, 2014).

18. See Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).

19. See http://www.savethecass.org (accessed June 2017); discussion following the question asked by the Earl of Clancarty, “To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will intervene to halt the sale of the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design building, Central House in Aldgate”, debate in House of Lords, 3 December 2015, available at https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201516/ldhansrd/text/151203-0001.htm (accessed May 26, 2020).

20. Debate in House of Lords, 3 December 2015.

21. See Connell, The Good University, in particular Chapter 3, “The Collective Intellectual: University Workers”: 54–72.

22. Giancarlo De Carlo, La piramide rovesciata (Bari: De Donato, 1968).

23. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 29.

24. Stefan Collini, “De-coding Edspeak: The Language of Higher Education Today” (public lecture, University of Westminster, February 12, 2018). See also Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities (London and New York: Verso, 2017).

25. Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism.

26. Ibid., 17.

27. See David C. Perry and Wim Wiewel, The University as Urban Developer: Case Studies and Analysis (Armonk, NY and Cambridge, MA: M.E. Sharpe, 2005).

28. The Undergraduate Business School, a renovation of the former St. George’s Brewery designed by Sergison Bates Architects and built in 2013–15.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sabrina Puddu

Sabrina Puddu (PhD) is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at KU Leuven, Faculty of Architecture. Her research focuses on the role of major public institutions across the divide of the contemporary urban and rural conditions, with her more recent studies being on prisons and agrarian penal colonies. Sabrina has co-authored two books and publishes regularly in architectural magazines and journals. She has taught design, history and theory at several institutions including the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins, Leeds Beckett University, and the Università degli Studi di Cagliari.

Francesco Zuddas

Francesco Zuddas (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Anglia Ruskin University and has taught architecture and urbanism at the Università degli Studi di Cagliari, the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins and the Leeds School of Architecture. His writings on postwar Italian urbanism and architecture, space and higher education, architectural pedagogy and the spatial implications of changing production paradigms to meet the knowledge economy, have appeared in AA Files, Domus, Oase, San Rocco, Territorio, and Trans, among others. His book, The University as a Settlement Principle: Territorialising Knowledge in Late 1960s Italy was published in 2020.