The Post-War University
Subtitle: Utopianist Campus and College
Publisher: Paul Mellon Centre BA
Published: May 1, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9780300087178
Subjects: Architectural structure & design; Public buildings: civic, commercial, industrial, etc; Universities / polytechnics; c 1945 to c 1960; c 1960 to c 1970; College And University Buildings; Public Buildings Architecture; Architecture; North America; Western Continental Europe; Higher; Public, Commercial, or Industrial Buildings; Architecture / Public, Commercial, or Industrial Buildings; Campus planning; College buildings; College facilities; Cross-cultural studies; Planning
Description: "This book examines the period of stupendous new university building from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, in the USA and Canada, in France as well as in West Germany, with the 'English Seven' - Sussex, York, Essex, East Anglia, Lancaster, Kent and Warwick - taking centre stage.".

"There was a widely shared belief that good planning and distinguished architecture could bring forth not only academically mature, but also socially adjusted citizens. University presidents, vice chancellors and rectors passionately believed that they were providing innovative architecture of the highest quality, while the designers held that their planning not only served function and beauty, but could guarantee the new universities as ideal, as total environments.

The optimal university should combine the bigness of the efficient Modernist campus with the intimacy of the old small college.".

"But this book is less concerned with a single utopian dream than with the complex stories of a great number of utopianist realities. It deals with the efforts as much as with the results, investigating the creation of institutions by charting the interaction of the diverse agendas of designers, educationalists, sociologists and politicians, tied, as they were, into each country's own traditions."--BOOK JACKET.