page_title: Buildings of Nuffield College, Oxford
section_title: Assessment
hierarchical_section_title: Buildings of Nuffield College, Oxford / Assessment
caption_attribution_description: The west gate of Nuffield College, Oxford
context_page_description: The buildings of Nuffield College, one of the colleges of the University of Oxford, are to the west of the city centre of Oxford, England, and stand on the site of the basin of the Oxford Canal. Nuffield College was founded in 1937 after a donation to the University by the car manufacturer Lord Nuffield; he gave land for the college, as well as £900,000 to build and endow it. The architect Austen Harrison, who had worked in Greece and Palestine, was appointed by the University to design the buildings. His initial design, heavily influenced by Mediterranean architecture, was rejected by Nuffield, who called it "un-English" and refused to allow his name to be associated with it. Harrison reworked the plans, aiming for "something on the lines of Cotswold domestic architecture", as Nuffield wanted.
  Construction of the second design began in 1949 and was finished in 1960. Progress was hampered by post-war building restrictions, and the effects of inflation on Nuffield's donation led to various cost-saving changes to the plans. In one change, the tower, which had been planned to be ornamental, was redesigned to hold the college's library.
context_section_description: The architectural writer Geoffrey Tyack has written that Nuffield College was Oxford's "most important architectural project of the immediate post-war years". Opinions about the architecture merits of the college have varied, although most have been unfavourable. The authors of a 1961 booklet on the architecture of modern Oxford said that it was "Oxford's biggest monument to barren reaction". The Cotswold style was "taken absurdly out of context and mercilessly stretched", and did not "harmonise with the clumsy tower", whilst the spire "[perched] uneasily ... despite its elaborate base". An unnamed journalist wrote in The Times in 1959 that the main buildings of the quadrangles were "somewhat oddly wedded to small basins which irresistibly suggest a Lilliputian Versailles". The same writer said that the tower rose "Manhattan-wise for 10 storeys through the twentieth century, only to have a diminutive spire, escaped from the fifteenth, push through its top to steal the last laugh". Peter Sager, too, thought that the "high-rise library" could "easily stand on the Hudson". Sir Howard Colvin said that the "utilitarian function" of the tower "accorded ill with its original ornamental purpose", and that the architects had "failed to find a satisfactory solution" to the "repetitive uniformity of fenestration".  Of the flèche, Colvin said that it "makes its contribution to the Oxford skyline without any overt reference to historical precedent". Geoffrey Tyack also disliked the tower, describing it as "an ungainly structure" that was "lit by a monotonous array of windows punched out of the wall surface"; however, he thought the hall was "an effective reinterpretation of the traditional collegiate pattern".
  The architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner compared the college unfavourably to the designs of the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen  for St Catherine's College, Oxford, construction of which began in 1960 (the year that Nuffield College was completed): St Catherine's, in his view, was "the most perfect piece of architecture of 20th-century Oxford" and made Nuffield "look even more absurd". Nevertheless, he "proposed forgiveness" for the "mighty tower", which "positively helps the famous skyline of Oxford", adding that it has "enough identity to be sure that one day it will find affection". He said that the tower had something of the architect Edwin Lutyens' "felicitous manipulation of period details into a non-period whole and will, I prophesy, one day be loved", although he was less sure that this fate awaited the rest of the buildings. Simon Jenkins said of Pevsner's prophecy about the tower, "I doubt it"; he described it as "at best ungainly", with a "weak spire", and said that "vegetation was its best hope, as for the rest of Nuffield". The college, in his view "required a sense of humour".
  Writing in 1952, after the first section of the buildings was complete, J. M. Richards, the editor of the Architectural Review, said that Nuffield was "a large-scale example of period-style architecture which has no justification whatever on grounds of consideration for the neighbours and represents missed opportunity of a really tragic kind". As the site was away from the "ancient colleges" of the city centre and in an area of "undistinguished nineteenth century commercial building", there had been a "rare opportunity" of building something "belonging ... to the twentieth century, and of showing that Oxford does not live only in the past". He said that the "compromise between contemporary needs and what is imagined to be the English collegiate tradition is quite unworthy of the educational enterprise the new foundation represents". He was, however, "thankful" that the building used smooth-faced stone "in the proper Oxford style" rather than rubble facing, which he said had been used elsewhere in Oxford "with extraordinarily unpleasing results".
  The architectural correspondent of The Times wrote that the architecture of the college was incongruous – it was "remarkable" that a college with connections to modern industry should be look
caption: Looking through the west gate into the lower quadrangle
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