The conference will take place at St Catherine’s and will include former colleagues of Jacobsen, as well as Stephen Hodder who has designed a number of additions to the college
A conference will take place on Saturday 27th August to celebrate the 60th annivesary of the opening of Arne Jacobsen’s St Catherine’s College at the University of Oxford.
The one-day conference will explore Arne Jacobsen’s work at St Catherine’s both in its 1960s context and from the present-day perspective of its influence in the UK and Denmark. The day’s talks will provide an opportunity to hear from members of Arne Jacobsen’s studio about their working relationship with the architect and their role in the design and construction of the college.
The event will also see the launch of a project by the college to oversee the digitisation of Arne Jacobsen’s drawings and plans of St Catherine’s. This is the first stage of a longer-term project to digitise all the drawings and plans held in the college’s physical archives. The aim is to provide an on-line resource for architecture researchers, students and practitioners.
Amongst the speakers will be Alistair Fair of the University of Edinburgh, who will be discussing ”St Catherine’s in the context of 1960s UK architecture - modernism and building for the new universities”. Former RIBA president Stephen Hodder will also be speaking about his own experience of adding to Jacobsen’s college.
Outside choice that paid off
Founded in 1962, St Catherine’s is one of Oxford’s youngest and largest colleges. It caused a stir when it appointed the Dane Arne Jacobsen – rather than a British architect – following an international design competition. But the decision was a success. Nikolaus Pevsner referred to it as “the perfect piece of architecture” while Reyner Banham, in a favourable comparison with Churchill College at Cambridge in the Architectural Review, approvingly called it “the best motel in Oxford”.
Built on a marshy site on the outskirts of the city centre, the college consists of two parallel, three-storey residential blocks with covered arcades plus four separate blocks containing common rooms, dining hall, library and lecture rooms running north to south between them. There is also a master’s house on the other side of a river that runs alongside the residential block, and a separate music room.
In 1993, the college was one of the first five post-war buildings to be given grade I listed status. Additional residential accommodation designed by Stephen Hodder was completed in 1994 and 2005.
The college celebrates its 60th anniversary this year.
Postscript
For further information, please contact the conference organiser, James Bennett at james.bennett@stcatz.ox.ac.uk.
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