New College Needs an Old Approach

Over the summer, work began on the University’s £142 million New College project on the former site of Madras College. The main building, built in 1832 in a Neo-Jacobean style, will be renovated, while new buildings will occupy the rest of the site. It will also become home to the Schools of Business and International Relations. While the investment in this project, including the renovation of an excellent building, is admirable, there is one glaring issue: it’s ugly. The proposals are bland, faceless, and totally unfaithful to the architectural heritage of St Andrews. The more avid fans of royal quotation will recognise the then-Prince of Wales’ label, “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend,” under which these designs unquestionably fall.

The current designs are similar in style to the Arts Building, Powell Hall, and those awful new flats by the Old Course, the construction of which slowly ruined my view from John Burnet over the course of last year. They are flat and out-of-proportion, lacking the right detail and texture that makes traditional architecture so pleasing to the eye.

New College should take on a traditional style. The quadrangle and the cloister are not cliches, but the hallmarks of collegiate architecture, which is essential for a strong and coherent community. People want to linger on the beautiful lawns and under the great arches that show a university is serious about its links to the students of its past and future. The importance of these links is long understood, and was passed on in good faith for generations, just for it to run into the unremitting, destructive forces of modernism, which, when unchecked, have a tendency to look only with contempt upon that which came before.

Campuses of the eastern United States — some of the most attractive in the world — were built in a neo-gothic collegiate style, often centuries after their inspirations at Oxford and Cambridge, and even as recently as 2017 at Yale. These attempts were not pastiche, but sincerely inspired by what had already been cherished for generations. Now, new students do not see a beauty-venerating world that they want to contribute to, but rather one that ignores the environment in which we live, starving us of everything but the practicalities of studying for a degree.

St Andrews had an opportunity to go against the increasingly drab grain. A commitment to new traditional architecture would show the academic world that beauty means something. An attractive New College could become the most charming part of the University, and would be a project of truly international significance in its stance against the uglier aspects of modernism. Despairingly, it is an opportunity that has not been taken. We will be left with a space that is nothing special, used but unloved — an architectural tragedy.

It is very rare that beauty is given any serious priority in new developments, but it is a quality deeply desired in the built environment. Surveys show that the public overwhelmingly prefers traditional architecture to contemporary designs. The modernist architect ignores this, decrying beauty as overindulgent and illogical. This view dismisses the lesson of architectural history that aesthetic sensibility is a necessary condition for good building. The new school of thought laughs in the face of the past. Ugly buildings are not loved; no one fights to preserve them when they outlive their original purpose. Beautiful architecture is cherished and reused for centuries, becoming increasingly charming with age. After all, why has all but the oldest part of Madras College been knocked down?

Photo from Wikimedia Commons