'Brutalism Among the Ladies': Modern Architecture at Somerville College, Oxford, 194.7-67
'Brutalism Among the Ladies': Modern Architecture at Somerville College, Oxford, 194.7-67 fry ALISTAIR FAIR In 1945, Janet Vaughan, a distinguished haematologist, became Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, her Principalship lasting until her retirement in 1967. Described in her obituary as 'a woman of extraordinary vitality and not a little impatience', Vaughan — awarded the DBE in 1957 — played a key role in steering the college through a period of major change in British Higher Education.1 Not least amongst the changes was a significant growth in the number of students at university across the country, which resulted in numerous, often high-profile, construction projects. Somerville, which had been founded in 1879 as the University of Oxford's second college for women, was not untouched by this development, and at Vaughan's retirement party, her colleague, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, referred to the several new buildings completed during the previous two decades.2 The college's post-war building campaign had begun modestly with two small infill developments by Geddes Hyslop in 1948-50 and 1954-56. However, Hyslop was subsequently replaced by Philip Dowson of Ove Arup's practice, who was responsible for three rather larger projects. First was the 'Margery Fry and Elizabeth Nuffield Graduate House', designed in 1958-59 and completed in 1964. It formed part of a larger scheme with his Vaughan Building for sixty undergraduates, which opened in 1966 (Fig. 1). Dowson's third and final commission was the Wolfson Building of 1967. All three buildings made prominent use of unadorned concrete as a way to connote something of their structure.
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