ABSTRACT
The twentieth-century campus can be seen as a battle between picturesque place making and the provision of rationally designed buildings. Picturesque enclosure is reserved, as at London and Nottingham Universities, for the centre where the images of collegiate interchange could be captured on camera. Away from the centre all was rational and shaped by the new technological order, with buildings arranged in parallel groupings around service roads. By the late 1930s the college green was a token whose echo was sounded by nostalgic vice-chancellors rather than progressive architects. Rational planning at Lancaster has not produced a 'place-less' campus but one whose sense of place is related to the curriculum as against the wider landscape. Whereas Spence at Sussex and Lasdun at East Anglia forged a sense of place for learning out of the geography of location and monumentality of forms, at Lancaster, the character of the campus is driven by the internal logic of their respective universities.
