I fetched up at Stirling on a scorching July afternoon, when the heat had slowed the city’s traffic to a crawl. Sunshine soaked into the Monaro I was driving at the time, its boot (predicatably) filled with boxes of architecture books, and every surface inside the cabin was hot. The honey-coloured sandstone of Stirling’s terraces gave off wafts of heated air which made the place shimmer when approached down the motorway. Ahead were the great rocky incline which the castle sits on; another pinnacle with the Wallace Monument perched on top, and further west, Craigforth rising up from the floodplain.
Turning off the M9 at the confluence of the Forth and Teith, you leave Craigforth behind, with its great wooded mound and cluster of insurance company buildings set apart from the city, and head up towards the university. Designed by RMJM, and built between 1967 and 1974, Stirling was the first complete newbuild campus in Scotland – as distinct from existing technical or university colleges which gained a promotion. It was the only “new” Scottish university built after the Robbins Report was published, and the first to be established in Scotland since the University of Edinburgh was founded in 1583.
Unlike the “Redbricks” in England from the same era, Stirling consists of crisp, bright buildings of dimensional blockwork and precast concrete, all faced with sparkling chips of white spar. The whiteness was dazzling as the sun hit its zenith. I located shade near the base of the Pathfoot building, parked, and quickly realised that my visit had coincided with a conference on Poetry and Politics. Pathfoot was the first piece of a masterplan which conceived of terraced buildings set around an artificial loch, with carefully-considered contours and planting. It steps down a landscaped hillside in a series of cascading flights of steps linking the long, transverse wings whose spirit is Scandinavian. The white precast fascias, black timber spandrels, and large expanses of yellow pine joinery inside include screens glazed in Georgian wired glass, which are so typical of that era – and the building’s whole programme is contained in a coherent building.
The political poets – or perhaps poetic politicians – made parallel tracks across the campus. In fact, it’s reported that some of those who use the building complain of the sameness of the rigorously rectilinear corridor system, but that grid was necessary to contain the great variety of functions. The plan is a variation of the “spider”, often employed for military barracks and also wartime emergency hospitals such as Bridge of Earn, Law, Stracathro and Killearn. As the first building of a new university, Pathfoot used that arrangement of a main spine corridor with wings and secondary corridors branching off laterally, to organise its accommodation. The spider contains staff rooms and library on the lowest terrace; undergraduate and research laboratories, lecture rooms and admin offices on the middle terrace; with common rooms, seminar and lecture rooms, and restaurant on the topmost level. Interestingly, before it became the university, the site was earmarked for a hospital, which proves the concept of “system thinking”, such that big bureaucracies like the NHS and education system create similar scales of building with similar typologies on similar sites.
As I wandered down the central stairs, I met groups of academics – mainly middle-aged women with cropped hair and penny-round glasses, speaking in Home Counties English or Midwestern American accents. They were, presumably, from those same Redbrick universities like Keele or East Anglia, and they loudly extolled the “craft” of one of the speakers. I wondered whether they were oblivious to the craft employed in creating the building? You assume that people attuned to the subtleties of expression which poets use would also appreciate the modulation and articulation involved in creating the spaces around them. Perhaps not. Earwigging into their conversations, there were offhand comments about the building, mainly grumbling about the flights of stairs, and the (vertical) distance they had to travel …
From the original Pathfoot building and MacRobert Arts Centre onwards, the campus is laid out in a series of freestanding blocks which cluster around Airthrey Loch, an artificial body of water which (forty years on) looks completely natural. Fringed with reeds and willows, the loch is home to waterbirds and its flowing, concave curves contrast with the stepping forms of the buildings, suggesting something of Aalto or Pietila. This is apt, since a composite of the Scandinavian Modernists’ approaches to architecture was what Robert Matthew had in mind when he developed his Scots “National Movement” a decade beforehand. The timber and rubble approach of the Queens Tower at Dundee University, Crombie Halls at Aberdeen, plus Lochay and Cashlie power stations in Perthshire, developed into the rationalised traditional architecture used here, with steel frames and prefabricated claddings.
The form-making at Stirling is different to those early period Matthew buildings – partly thanks to these buildings having a different programme than the earlier ones, and also because RMJM were less consciously seeking a sense of Scottishness with these larger, masterplanned schemes. The university is located in a wider European, rather than Scottish or British, context, and is one of the finest collections of buildings of that era. It isn’t urbanism, which is the current fashionable discipline which students are pointed towards … instead, it’s about working with other disciplines to set modern architecture into the landscape, and complete a unified environment. In effect, it’s a working model of a much larger community, perhaps a pocket city: residential accommodation is within walking distance of the workplace, and cultural facilities. Sports and leisure buildings are equally accessible, and there are good transport links from a local hub.
The visiting poetry delegates filed up the steps towards the car park – unlike how Martin Amis characterises poets, these were critics and academics, so presumably they did have driving licences. Amusingly, they cast dirty looks in the direction of the Monaro. Their prejudices about cars were obvious, and perhaps their preconceptions about Scottish architecture were intact, too. Certainly, the Wallace Monument glowers down on the campus, full of self-conscious symbolism which is far away from the inherent qualities of Airthrey. As they climbed into their new-style Minis and Fiat 500’s, did they realise how Scotland had changed in the century which separates the monument and the university? More importantly, did they realise that Stirling marks the birth of an architecture which fostered a modern Scottish education system?
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