St Catherine’s College

Selected by

Colin Tweedy, CEO The Building Centre

Colin Tweedy LVO OBE

Colin Tweedy since 2012 is Chief Executive of the Building Centre and Built Environment Trust.
From 1983 to 2012 Colin was Chief Executive of Arts & Business (formerly Association for Business Sponsorship of the Arts). Colin co- founded, with The Prince of Wales, The Prince of Wales Arts & Kids Foundation ( subsequently called Children & The Arts ). A former trustee of the Serpentine Gallery and governor of the University for the Creative Arts. MA Oxford University, St Catherine’s College, graduating in 1976. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA ). A Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order (LVO) and Officer of the British Empire (OBE)
Location

Manor Road, Oxford, OX1 3UJ
Tel: +44 (0)1865 271 700
Architect

Listed Grade I and Grade II
Architect: Arne Jacobsen, 1962.
Additional works: Purcell (purcelluk.com)

St Catherine’s College is one of the newer colleges; construction started in 1960. The college’s main campus was designed in its totality by Danish architect, Arne Jacobsen. St Catherine’s is consistent with Modernist architecture of its time, the buildings featuring open-plan quads, large spacious rooms and long rectangular windows.

Completed in 1962, the college is arguably one of the best-preserved pieces of Jacobsen’s work. Everything within the original campus was designed or approved by Jacobsen: the buildings, furniture, including the famous high-back Oxford chairs to flatware, clocks even the cutlery. It was also one of the first Oxford colleges to admit women.

Planting and landscaping were an integral part of Jacobsen’s project with a water garden along the western side of the building and a bronze by Barbara Hepworth nearby.

Over the decades, the college has commissioned additional buildings on the site, notably by Jacobsen’s assistant Knud Holscher (1982) and Stirling Prize winner Stephen Hodder (1994, 2005). The entrance to the college with its view over Jacobsen’s water garden was remodelled by Sir Philip Powell in 1968.

In 2016, Purcell was appointed to extend upon Hodder’s second phase of works resulting in four new pavilions providing 78 graduate bedrooms based around the traditional collegiate staircase layout. The Purcell design followed consultation with Hodder and approaches the typology set-out by Hodder in Phase II of his works as sensitively as possible.
Interesting Facts

Best remembered now as a furniture designer, the Egg chair, designed by Jacobsen, has come to symbolise mid-century modernism and is considered a masterpiece, and an original can cost up to £5,000. It was originally designed for the lobby of the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen.

The high back Oxford chairs were designed by Jacobsen for the professors of St Catherine’s, a symbol of status and prestige. Bonhams featured one in an auction in Brazilian rosewood and valued it at between £10,000-£15,000.
Resources

Best Buildings Britain by Matthew Freedman published by Luster. Architectural Digest www.architecturaldigest.com

St Catherine’s College as created by Arne Jacobsen is that living embodiment of design in all its forms coming together to create a masterpiece still lived in today and across the years by thousands of students and staff.

In the lodge at the entrance to St Catherine’s College in Oxford are two quotations from the college’s architect Arne Jacobsen. The first reads;

“It has been said for many years that when a thing is practical and functional, it is beautiful as well.”
Arne Jacobsen

I would imagine most architects today would subscribe to these sentiments and Arne Jacobsen’s design for the new college of Oxford University is universally acclaimed as a masterpiece. However when I went up to Oxford as a undergraduate in October 1973 I was more than daunted and somewhat alarmed by what was for me my first experience of “modern architecture“. Coming as I did from a thatched cottage in Abbotsbury, Dorset, I was expecting to be housed in ivy clad mediaeval cloisters. That is what I thought Oxford University was all about – “dreaming spires” and everyone looking like Sebastian Flyte, draped in gay apparel as immortalized by Evelyn Waugh.

I spent my first two years living in the college, on what was designated “the quiet staircase“, reserved for what the dons thought were the bookish students! I soon grew to realise the college was incredibly beautiful, as Jacobsen said, practical and functional can be beautiful. Though one of the practical issues of the design were somewhat challenging. The concrete walls were not particularly soundproofed and the Jacobsen designed beds, very much spartan and single became very audible when one invited a “guest“ to share the night with you! The carpets also were not made of natural fabrics and often one experienced a mild electric shock to enliven things. The college ran out of money during the building and the copper external grills that should have covered the floor to ceiling windows and cooled our rooms in the summer never materialised and many of us spent the summer studying in our underpants to keep cool, often very visible to anyone wandering past.

St Catherine’s College

Jacobsen, a modernist Danish architect, was a bold choice for normally very traditional university dons. The original buildings were built between 1964 and 1966 and the founders’ choice was immediately acclaimed. Nikolaus Pevsner, whose Buildings of England are still the standard publication, wrote that “Here is a perfect piece of architecture. It has a consistent plan and every detail is meticulously worked out. Self discipline is the message, expressed in terms of a geometry pervading the whole and the parts and felt wherever one moves or stops.”

Not only did Jacobsen design a beautiful set of buildings centred on a quadrangle, he designed everything associated with a university college. He designed the furniture, chairs, tables, lamps, cutlery, ashtrays, his brother made the unique plugs to fit in the very narrow skirting boards Jacobsen insisted on. He designed the gardens, specified the plants, many from Denmark, including, what may be apocryphal, specifying that the soil came from Denmark. But Jacobsen did specify the type of fish that would swim in the pond he, of course, designed. In 1993 the college was given Grade I listing and the gardens and buildings upgraded to the highest level of protection by Historic England for historical and design interest.

In this celebration of the Building Centre’s first 90 years the Built Environment Trust is marking not only buildings, but our whole built environment created in this time. St Catherine’s College as created by Arne Jacobsen is that living embodiment of design in all its forms coming together to create a masterpiece still lived in today and across the years by thousands of students and staff.

Jacobsen opened my eyes, a country boy from Dorset to what modern design can achieve. As Jacobsen himself said;

“Architecture tends to consume everything else. It has become one’s entire life.”
Arne Jacobsen

“It has been said for many years that when a thing is practical and functional, it is beautiful as well.”

“Architecture tends to consume everything else. It has become one’s entire life.”

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