It is very hard to imagine the University of Oxford ever constructing a modernist building again. This is the significance of the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. In its sheer scale, in its prominence both within the city centre and within the university – the first multi-department, purpose-built structure to open in its history – it is the most important building to be erected in Oxford in half a century and an endstop to an architectural era. One can imagine that its use of a restrained classicism won’t just influence the architectural aesthetics of Oxford but also of other universities within historical cities, both in the UK and internationally.

Its impact is all the more profound given its radical – in Oxford terms – proposition. Since that unfortunate incident in 1209 when Oxford’s townspeople lynched a student, prompting some scholars to flee to Cambridge where they founded an alternative place of study, the university has developed a built form to keep the city at arm’s length. The beautiful cloistered quadrangles that we know today are legible as such only from the inside. They are walls to those who live outside them. This typology has evolved but remained largely unchanged even into the 20th century.

This is despite the fact that one of the propositions of modernism in postwar Britain was to be somehow open, either visually through glazed façades or through huge open plans once inside. This has not been the case in Oxford, where the impact of modernism has been largely symbolic. The exoskeleton of the Thomas White Building at St John’s College by Arup Associates may straddle the old wall on Lamb and Flag Passage but it remains inaccessible except to those who are allowed through the porters’ gate. The Schwarzman is a genuine attempt to reorder that relationship with an open-access building – the public is free to wander both the ground floor and basement.

One of the achievements of the postwar modernists, however, was their ability to create megastructures that blended multiple uses – Denys Lasdun’s University of East Anglia complex comes to mind. At the Schwarzman Centre, the marriage of so many departments........

© The Spectator