You may think that follies are throwbacks to the past. As an idea, they are out of time– but Universities have always prided themselves on being patrons of architecture, and sometimes their patronage leads to unexpected results.
The Round and Square Towers, designed by Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones, were the first stage in the expansion of Aberdeen's Robert Gordon University along the bank of the River Dee. They were built to serve as halls of residence for the rapidly-expanding cadet university, and they consist of a square tower with four flats, one per storey, plus a common room at the top; and a round tower with six flats, one per storey… and a common room at the top. The two are separated by other buildings, and can never really be read together, other than in a fleeting glimpse from the South Deeside Road, across the river. All the flats are self catering, with five individual en-suite study bedrooms arranged around a communal area.
At the time of their construction, mention was made of Scots baronial tower houses– but the towers actually owe more to the architecture of Middle Europe. They play a double game: saying one thing to their Scottish context, with another, different message for architectural insiders. They are self-aware, knowing– even a little droll. Their architects, Dixon Jones, said- “Taking the form of Scottish tower houses, using traditional forms and material, the tree-lined ridge of the embankment is enhanced by the buildings in a romantic and pictorial manner. The advantage of the 'tower house' form is that the area taken up by the plan is minimised. The buildings are small in bulk compared with the dominating scale of the line of trees”. In fact, the formal games of the towers– the regimentation of their windows, the faceting of their verticals, the rosy stucco of their walls, even the Georgian grey of the window frames– all suggest something of the Teutonic neo-Classicism of Albers or Schinkel. They are formal, spare– if not spartan.
The Square lad sits on a terrace shared with the estate’s original seat, Garthdee House, and overlooks a lawn dotted with monkey puzzle trees. It acknowledges the granite ashlar of the house with a neat cubic porch in dimensional granite, but also masks the plain concrete wall of an existing lecture theatre. The Round chappie stands alone, on the brink of a steep tree-lined bank which tumbles down to a bend on the Dee. This drop accentuates the tower’s height, although the curve reduces the sense of sheer verticality which the sharp edges of the Square tower (which isn’t actually a pure square on plan) emphasise. Both towers have an external finish of pink harling, similar to that applied to Crathes Castle.
It’s difficult to use the Scots tower house as a model for modern buildings. Almost everyone likes the idea of a tower– but modern requirements like passenger lifts and fire escape stairs take up space, leaving little usable room within a slender tower. In the distant past, we built walls thick enough to contain the stairs, wardrobes and even lavvies. Now that walls are so much thinner relative to the spaces they contain, those functions still have to be fitted in somewhere, along with many others… and therein lies the success of Dixon-Jones’ design.
The Round Tower’s well-rooted appearance belies the engineering needed to make it stand up: because it was built on the very edge of the escarpment leading down to the river, expensive piled foundations were required to prevent the building’s base crumbling away into the river. The building is constructed the traditional way, using loadbearing masonry, and given its height this technique is almost at its limit: a block at the base of the wall has to resist the crushing weight of many tons of blockwork above it. The tower’s circular form, its height, and the proximity of mature trees all reputedly caused headaches for the building contractor; however, 14 years later, the buildings stand foursquare. Their roof structures are less traditional, with a roof terrace and glazed belvedere on top of each tower, to house the common room.
The interiors are relatively spartan, with lots of hard finishes: exposed concrete treads to the stairs, and a great deal of undecorated timber in the common rooms. The architects seem afraid of the destructive power of undergraduates, and made the building accordingly, rather than relying on the architecture’s civilising potential. The square tower claims the glory of a Saltire Society award, won by both towers in 1994– they also won awards from the Civic Trust and Royal Institute of British Architects. As it is, only ten flats with fifty bedspaces have been provided between two towers, at an undoubtedly high cost per bedspace: the towers are rather inefficient as halls of residence, although they are picturesque.
The Garthdee estate was gifted to the then Robert Gordon’s Institute of Technology by Tom Scott Sutherland, an architect-developer whose claim to immortality is the introduction of the filter lane with its “green arrow” at traffic lights throughout Aberdeen. He acquired twenty acres of Garthdee with the intention of leaving it as a bequest to house a school of architecture: he was one of the first to study architecture in Aberdeen, during the Great War, and the institution became the Scott Sutherland School in 1956 in his honour. Garthdee makes up the eastern part of the Pitfodels estate, from Garthdee House towards Brig o’ Dee, and is composed of rectangular parks which run down to the river, each bounded by shelter belts of beech trees.
Likewise, the towers needed a wellspring of funding and patronage, and Gavin Ross, the university’s Vice Chancellor at the time, sought out benefactors, then invited a handful of architects to present their ideas. Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones got the job, although that decision was reputedly controversial, since an open architectural competition is often held to choose a designer for a project like this. Dixon-Jones began their careers at Milton Keynes in the 1960’s, and went on to remodel the Covent Garden Opera House in London: this is their only Scottish work, and it could be argued that they brought with them a sentimental notion of Scottish Architecture. However, one of the conditions attached to the funding was that the work should be of architectural merit, and Gavin Ross converted that into an aesthetic preference. The towers’ anonymous benefactors effectively got Scots in translation: a little of the tenement and rather more of the tower house. It’s also worth noting that Gavin Ross is credited with introducing the Scots towerhouse to Louis Kahn. Kahn, a Modernist revered by many as “the architect’s architect”, had a practice in Philadelphia where Ross worked during the 1960’s. The master’s love of masonry walls obviously rubbed off on Gavin Ross.
In that context, the patron becomes an architecture collector, and as Walter Benjamin said: “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” Thus the towers have complex memories of their many ancestors– perhaps also including a passing reference to the Water works at Mannofield. There, a square and a round towers sit on the grassy Mannofield grounds, opposite the cricket pitch, as entrances to two huge covered reservoirs. As with the halls of residence, their forms are intended to be eyecatchers in the picturesque tradition, whitewashed stonework with mock battlements on top.
Given their bold approach to fitting students into an appropriately-shaped container, it’s worth considering that the Round and Square Towers are the most distinctive halls of residence to be built in this country since James Stirling was commissioned by the University of St Andrews in 1964. Big Jim (who was born in Scotland) was almost certainly the greatest architect of his generation, and the Andrew Melville Halls, overlooking the Old Course, are his only work in his native country. They are radical “ships on land”, fingers which splay out to give everyone a sea view– although Stirling famously sent critic Charles Jencks a photo of the building with the caption, “Dear Charles, this is not a battleship,” scrawled across it. At the heart of these buildings, too, are communal facilities.
Andrew Melville Halls
Gavin Ross foresaw a larger collection of Garthdee’s towers dotted across the lawns, like a series of cute little fastnesses dotted along the North Deeside Road. Edward Jones himself feels that had his practice had the chance to build more student residences, they would have adopted a different form– perhaps modelled on a walled garden. Certainly the intention was that these would be the first of many… but as it is, these two student residences at Garthdee were followed in 1998 by the Management Faculty. It was designed by Norman Foster (perhaps the only living architect that laypeople have heard of, since James Stirling’s death) and it is quite different in character to the towers. Part of a masterplan whose eventual aim is to remove the whole campus of Robert Gordon’s University from Schoolhill to Garthdee, it is a shiny roof which describes an arc towards the river, broken up with sawtooth rooflights. Where the towers tread lightly, the Foster approach is, to quote one architect– “Like hiding tanks in a forest.”
The towers were designed in 1991, construction began in 1992, and they were completed by New Year 1994. Since then, the exteriors have weathered reasonably well, although the green growth on the harling is an inevitable consequence of building hard against mature trees. Since the architects took great pains to preserve those trees, that’s a minor cavil. Given their solidity and the solicitude of RGU’s Estates Department, it’s likely that these buildings will outlast most of the other buildings on site. The halls are popular with students, which is just as well, since it was a condition of the gift that the designs should be conducive to the social well-being of their residents.
The creation of space for socialising is important, not least to encourage folk to mix, rather than withdraw. Usually, places in Halls are offered to first year students, and it’s important that they feel connected to other people, rather than being isolated in scruffy digs miles from the campus. Today, it is easy to get lost in yourself: living in a bubble of music piped through your iPod, working on an internet-based syllabus with your laptop, only connecting with other people through cellphones and email. Even for hedonistic students, the weeks leading up to exams can be a lonely place. The urge to retreat can be powerful, and often needs something to counteract it.
Dixon-Jones provided a central space on each floor where the residents can set up a table to eat at, work on, or to chew the fat around– and then there is the generous common room under the roof of each tower. Perhaps the tower house, with all the social possibilities of its top floor “rumpus room”, isn’t such an act of folly after all.
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