A coach tour with Tim Mars on Saturday 29 September 2018 The last few years has seen a dazzling array of new buildings rising across the city. At one end of the spectrum shimmers Zaha Hadid 's undulating stainless steel funnel at St Antony's College (2015). At the other stands John Simpson 's formal, classical, redbrick and stone entrance quadrangle for Lady Margaret Hall (2017), with its axial pair of colonnaded entrance lodges taking cues from the Porta Maggiore in Rome. Between these two, a handful of remarkable new buildings demonstrate a bewildering range of approaches, materials and æsthetics - the distinction between 'modern' and 'post-modern' seems at best redundant. Among the most applauded is Níall McLaughlin 's elegant Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre (2017) for Worcester College - RIBA South Building of the Year and now shortlisted for the Stirling Prize . Tate Modern architects Herzog and de Meuron made their Oxford début with an offset glass wedding cake for the Blavatnik School of Government (2015). The 'window to the world' above the entrance is the largest double-glazed single pane of glass in Europe. In 2014 WilkinsonEyre - designers of the Gateshead Millennium Bridge - built a skewed 'bird's nest on stilts' for Maggie's Cancer Care outside Churchill Hospital. Rafael Viñoly - architect of the 2015 Carbuncle Cup -winning ‘bloated, inelegant, thuggish’ Walkie-Talkie in the City of London - has done rather better in Oxford with his suave Mathematical Institute (2013) in the University's new Radcliffe Observatory Quarter. Cohen Quadrangle (2017) is a new third quad for Exeter College - a 10-minute walk from the mothership on Turl Street. The competition-winning design by Alison Brooks Architects incorporates two retained façades of Ruskin College . The re-profiled roof of the shell of the listed 1913 building and the new courtyards are sheathed in patterned stainless-steel fish scales that fold across wall and roof surfaces alike. The offset windows and striated, punctuated screen of Design Engine 's Hubert Perrodo Building (2018) for St Peter's College are set in a beautifully remodelled and re-landscaped series of quads masterplanned by Allies and Morrison . We will also visit earlier harbinger examples of modern architecture in Oxford, including Architects' Co- Partnership 's the Beehive (1958) at St John's College - the first modern building to be built in an Oxford college - with its irregular hexagonal rooms grouped around three top-lit staircases crowned by octagonal lanterns. Howell Killick Partridge & Amis’s 1959 entry to the competition to design Churchill College Cambridge came a close second to the winning entry and caused a sensation. It consisted of two large interlocking horseshoe- shaped courtyards separated by a moat, with festive roof forms and elaborately faceted façades. Had it been built it would have been a mélange of Gothic Baroque executed in concrete instead of stone or stucco - a delirious modernism steeped in Englishness on a scale not seen since the Woods in Bath and Nash in London. This much-acclaimed scheme led to HKPA being commissioned to design the Hilda Besse Building (1962-71) for St Antony’s College , featuring an impressive two-storey top-lit dining hall. Historic England hailed it as ‘perhaps the ultimate expression of the HKPA idiom of prefabricated, precast post-and lintel construction and may be their finest work’ when listing it at Grade II. It now squares up to the baleful gaze of Zaha Hadid 's Investcorp Building (2015). This glazed façade forms one end of a stainless steel tube. HKPA went on to build the Wolfson & Rayne Buildings (1964-1969) for St Anne’s College - two four-storey halls of residence with convex sides swelling around a central circular staircase, linked to one another by an open walkway. Originally conceived as six linked buildings overlooking a lake (as in their Churchill competition entry), only two were built and the moat was never constructed. Also listed at Grade II. Philip Dowson and Peter Foggo of Arup Associates deployed precast concrete exoskeletons for three buildings at Somerville College , culminating in the Wolfson Building ( 1966). Its large plate-glass oriel windows protrude beyond the concrete structure - erected in six weeks - which pioneered the use of storey-height precast concrete cladding. Recently given a sensitive ground-floor extension by Níall McLaughlin . In 1968 Powell & Moya completed Blue Boar Quad for Christ Church College - a handsome and sophisticated exercise in Portland stone, precast concrete and lead. Built up against a high wall bordering Blue Boar Lane , the horizontal sweep of the wall becomes the first layer in a complex composition. The building is given a pronounced vertical emphasis and artfully articulated so it shifts and slides restlessly back and forth against the sweep of older masonry. It is a memorable addition to Oxford’s townscape. Dowson and Foggo of Arup Associates went on to build the Thomas White Building for St John's College in 1972, refining and perfecting the expressive possibilities of precast concrete construction. Perhaps inspired by Blue Boar Lane , here the building's exoskeleton straddles the mediæval boundary wall to Lamb and Flag Passage. Stone-clad staircase towers punctuate the skyline, and Japanese-style wooden screens behind the windows give privacy. At Keble , the sloping curved façade of the intertwined De Breyne (1973) and Hayward quadrangles (1977) by Ahrends Burton & Koralek (ABK) triumphantly demonstrates how an unashamedly modern building can respect and enhance even architecture as bold and uncompromising as William Butterfield 's relentlessly patterned high-Victorian gothic brickwork. Starting as a tight spiral around De Breyne Quad, the building unwinds like a coiled spring along the side of Hayward Quad before unravelling in a final flurry around the college bar. Each floor of brown patent-glazing projects slightly from the floor above, finally extending at ground level to form the glass roof to a light and airy sunken cloister . ABK went on from this triumph to win a competition to extend the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square in 1984. Richard Rogers - one of the shortlisted runners-up - described the ABK design as ‘beautiful, with a palette of materials that responded to the existing National Gallery without resorting to imitation. It was elegantly modern, with a small piazza that brilliantly separated their building from William Wilkins ’s 1832 Gallery.’ ABK were asked to add a tower to their scheme - Rogers’s entry featured a space-age tower to respond to the tower of St Martin-in- the-Fields —and the result was called ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend’ by Prince Charles. The scheme was never built. ABK were severely damaged by Charles’s attack. Work dried up and the practice was almost forced to close. In 1974 Powell & Moya were chosen after an international search to build Wolfson College , a new graduate college beside the River Cherwell in north Oxford. It is a fluid, informal composition of open and enclosed quadrangles - the formal Berlin Quad , Tree Quad built around established trees, and River Quad into which the River Cherwell has been diverted to form a punt harbour. One side of River Quad is curved in deference to Sir Isaiah Berlin ’s love of Portofino in Italy, from where he sent postcards to the architects. The main building and footbridge across the river were Grade II listed in June 2011. It is a romantic, picturesque and very English sequence of spaces—in contrast to the rigid, orthogonal, high- modernist rationalism of Arne Jacobsen ’s earlier St Catherine’s College (1962). In 1982 the axial planning, broken pediments and cascading pitched roofs of MacCormac ’s Sainsbury Building for Worcester College - artfully sited at the edge of lake - heralded a new, more contextual approach. It was a game- changer which completely rewrote the rulebook of Oxford collegiate architecture. MacCormac also transformed how student accommodation was organised. Instead of a shared galley kitchen, five study bedrooms are grouped around a large farmhouse kitchen - like students sharing a house with the kitchen as their communal living room. The Sainsbury Building has now been joined by Níall McLaughlin 's Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre next door. The Garden Quadrangle at St John’s was built in 1991, also by Richard MacCormac - creating one of the most beguiling series of spaces, vistas and elevations in Oxford. An auditorium and dining room occupy a ground level, top-lit nether world with shades of Piranesi . Above these, a landscaped deck forms an upper world where study-bedrooms punctuate the skyline in a series of lantern-like prospect towers . Smaller buildings (fellows’ sets and a belvedere) in the foreground contribute to the complexity of the silhouette. Everywhere steps lure you upward to explore. In a poll conducted by the Oxford Times in 2003, the Garden Quadrangle was voted the best building constructed in Oxford in the previous 75 years . Oxford’s dreaming spires were joined in 2001 by the copper-clad ziggurat - which doubles as a heat exchanger – of Jeremy Dixon & Edward Jones’s Saïd Business School . The ziggurat is based on the tower of Nicholas Hawksmoor's brooding St George's Church in Bloomsbury. Which is, in turn, derived from the form of the legendary Mausoleum at Halicarnassus —one of the Seven Wonders of the World. While the focus of this tour is on modern architecture, we will pass through many historic quadrangles and along old streets , lanes , alleys ,squares a nd crescents along the way. We leave the city by coach along the High Stree t, one of the finest architectural promenades in Europe - alas, currently disfigured by cars and buses in a city crying out for a tram. Grenoble , twinned with Oxford, has been transformed and its streets civilised by the reïntroduction of trams from 1987 onwards.