Sainsbury Centre UEA Case Number
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English Heritage Advice Report 13 December 2012 Case Name: Sainsbury Centre UEA Case Number: 469223 Background English Heritage has been asked to assess the Sainsbury Centre for listing as it is now more than 30 years old. Asset(s) under Assessment Facts about the asset(s) can be found in the Annex(es) to this report. Annex List Entry Number Name Heritage Category EH Recommendation 1 1409810 Sainsbury Centre, Listing Add to List attached walkway, underground loading bay, and retaining walls to loading bay access road at the University of East Anglia Visits Date Visit Type 09 December 2011 Full inspection Context The Sainsbury Centre stands at the south-west side of the campus. A number of buildings at the University of East Anglia (UEA) were listed in 2003: Suffolk and Norfolk Terrace, both at Grade ll*, and the Teaching Wall and the Library, both at Grade ll. In 2007, a Conservation and Development Strategy for the university was adopted and agreed with English Heritage and Norwich City Council. It acts as a philosophy and guide for development and maintenance works on the campus buildings and landscape. The Crescent Wing addition to the original building is too young to be assessed for listing and is not included in this report. Assessment CONSULTATION The owners, local authority and applicant were consulted on the facts of the assessment, and no responses were received. DISCUSSION The DCMS Principles of Selection (March 2010) stipulate that buildings of less than 30 years old are normally listed only if they are of outstanding quality and under threat. Now that the Sainsbury Centre has passed this crucial age (more than 30 years since its construction began in 1977), it can be considered for listing at any grade and without being under threat. Happily this is not the case as it is very well cared for and actively managed by the University of East Anglia and associated parties. Page 1 of 9 English Heritage Advice Report 13 December 2012 The Listing Selection Guide for Education Buildings (English Heritage 2011) offers an insight into the considerations for assessment designation. Most older university buildings are already listed and early-C20 university buildings are judged largely on their architectural quality. The level of intactness is likely to be a factor, and historic interest an issue, as early, innovative examples of certain sorts of buildings will have an extra claim to recognition. The quality of the interior design, and group value will be key determinants too. For higher education buildings erected after 1945 the design quality may be the most significant area of interest. These buildings include some of the most exciting buildings of their day, and can be of international importance. Architectural interest will be determined sometimes by questions of successful functionality, as well as by consideration of design quality. Until the 1960s, campuses developed piecemeal but certain groups of buildings, such as those disposed around the central university administrative and governance block, often including the library, emerge as coherent ensembles of overall listable quality. Post-war integrated campuses may justify (if practicable) a holistic approach to designation that takes in areas of the site, perhaps including registration of the landscape setting too. University campuses or other areas where there is a concentration of educational buildings of mixed quality might be amenable to other forms of designation (notably as conservation areas), or a combination of area designation with specific listings. Where campuses contain designated monuments or structures, group value is a factor to consider for any additional designations. The Listing Selection Guide for Culture and Entertainment buildings (English Heritage 2011) has less to say about post-war buildings, but notes that they require stringent assessment, with architectural quality, innovation and social significance being the principal factors of relevance. Norman Foster received his architectural training at Manchester University School of Architecture and Yale University. He worked with his wife, Wendy, and Richard and Sue Rogers as a member of Team 4, until Foster Associates was founded in London in 1967. Creekvean (1964-7, listed Grade II*) was their first completed work; a building that hints at the subsequent significant developments in modern, technologically innovative architecture with its early use of neoprene gaskets and modern materials. Most of Foster's major buildings in England are located in or near London: Stansted Airport (1981-1991), the British Museum Great Court (2001), the London Millennium Bridge (1996-2000), the so-called 'Gherkin' – 30 St Mary Axe (2000-2004), and London City Hall (2003). Internationally, he is famous for the spectacular Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (1979-1986), the Chek Lap Kok Airport (1992-1998) in Hong Kong, the Commerzbank Headquarters (1991-1997) in Frankfurt, and the Millau Viaduct (2004) in France. Foster was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1983, and the RIBA Trustees Medal in 1990 for the Willis Faber Building in Ipswich (1973-5, listed Grade l). He was also knighted in 1990, and received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1999. Foster's design for the Willis Faber headquarters is symptomatic of his signature use of technological innovation and industrialized, prefabricated, modular units. The Sainsbury Centre's large cuboid, clad, steel structure, stands in contrast to the curvilinear lines of the Ipswich building. Its orthogonal aspect is more comparable to the rectilinear, living-space block of Creekvean House, or the Centre for Clinical Sciences Research in Palo Alto, California (1995-2000). Like the Sainsbury Centre, the Californian building is based on a visible prefabricated skeleton, forming a clear-span, industrial-style structure. The multi-award-winning Sainsbury Centre, designed by Foster Associates and opened in 1977 is recognised world-wide as a high point of the British High Tech movement, and a modern classic. It is of international importance when considered against late-C20 buildings of any type, but as a university museum, exhibition and education building it is remarkably fit for purpose due to its innovative engineering; a fine example of collaboration between engineer and designer in the historical tradition of the great British engineering pioneers. Like the High Tech icon, the Pompidou Centre in Paris (Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, 1971-77), the Sainsbury Centre's open and flexible interior spaces, created by virtue of the remarkable span achieved by its tubular-steel trusses, and by housing services within the wall thickness the columns create, can be left open, as it is for the main gallery, or compartmentalised; it can be a route through the building or a place to stop and view. The materials are of high quality and the use of 7.3m, full-height glass panels, strengthened with unique fins, was highly innovative: a significant step forward from the Willis Faber Building's glazing, which hangs from the frame in the conventional curtain-wall fashion. The innovation extends to the method of construction where the amount of wet work needed was very limited, and the steel frames arrived on site ready assembled, needing only to be raised into position, like the timber-frame of a great medieval tithe barn, and in the vanguard of later, construction industry-wide, moves toward prefabrication. It was a leader too in the move towards energy efficiency, by virtue of the ventilation system, the insulating external cladding and foam infill, and in the use of natural daylight. The hangar-like internal space and proportions, and details such as the circular nozzles for the ventilation system, all give the building an aerospace feel; even the toilets are said to have been inspired by those of a Boeing 747 aircraft. This adds to the centre's High Tech credentials and harks forward to Foster's Stansted Page 2 of 9 English Heritage Advice Report 13 December 2012 Airport design, as well as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank where again Foster's moved the services to the extremities to maximise the contained space. The centre stands in contrast to the more Brutalist form of the university's other celebrated buildings, and thereby reflects developments in British architectural design since the original campus was constructed. Denys Lasdun's masterplan for the University of East Anglia (UEA), envisaged an expansion of the campus westwards, so the Sainsbury Centre fits satisfactorily with the overall ambitions for the site, and, by virtue of its orientation, with the zig-zag lines of the Teaching Wall, so that the visitor's arrival at the centre is a natural result of the route through the campus. By merging gallery, teaching dept, library and common room, Foster brought into the modern era ideas in building for education begun in the late C19, at the Arkwright Building of Nottingham Trent University for example (1877-81, Lockwood and Mawson, listed Grade ll*), but also echoed part of Denys Lasdun's thinking in the integrated concept of the Teaching Wall at the UEA (1964-8, listed Grade ll), to which the Sainsbury Centre is linked by an overhead walkway, a quote from Lasdun's concept. Upon opening, some of the architectural press criticised Foster's design, and some felt that a High Tech industrial-style building could not successfully house the artefacts that form the Sainsbury Collection. On the other hand, many praised it, and it is now generally accepted as manifestly successful and influential.