ITINERARY_Guide: University buildings

Perhaps reflecting their origin in the monastic tradition, university buildings are typological hybrids – part workaday educational buildings, part grand civic institutions.

The early days of local universities produced palaces of learning, such as Maxwell Bury’s Registry Building at the University of Otago (1878) and Lippincott and Billson’s ClockTower at the University of Auckland (1926). With the massive post-war expansion of universities, which resulted in much of our current campus architecture, things became more serious. Like much civic architecture of the time, value was placed on design that was robust, direct and filled the needs of as many people as possible. A focus on standardisation, repetition and combinations of off-form and precast concrete delivered brutalism that was sometimes dramatic, sometimes dour. By the 1980s and 1990s, we were all over the show – Warren and Mahoney created a campus for Massey University in Albany that was a swathe of Palo Alto PoMo (mid-1990s) but, across town, JASMaD was completing Waipapa Marae (1988) at Auckland and Rewi Thompson was creating a radical building for Unitec’s Māori Studies department (1993).

Changes in the structure of the tertiary education sector in the 1990s triggered more intense competition between institutions. Architecture again became part of the way universities differentiated themselves – the way they branded. In place of the stolid post-war slabs, we had visual drama and spatial porosity. Particularly in recent years, almost all big university buildings have been arranged around dramatic atria and voids. Lounges took the place of courtyards. This new openness might be explained