The University of East Anglia in Norwich was one of the group of seven new universities set up in the United Kingdom in the 1960s in a wave of optimism. The university set out to embody this optimism in an entirely new kind of campus design and, as patron, has engaged some of the most able and distinguished architects of the second half of the twentieth century to work for it: Lasdun, Feilden, Luckhurst, then Foster (the Sainsbury Centre), Miller and, mostrecently, Mather. The authors record, illustrate and discuss the particular circumstances of the university's commissioning of architects to develop buildings on the main campus of Norwich, from the sophisticated but gentle architecture of the 1990s to the architectural heroism and brutalism of the 1960s and 1970s, explaining the political and financial constraints which caused new methods of construction and changes in the choice of design and building materials as the plans for the development of the University unfolded.
PETER DORMER, historian of Modernist design and architectural contributor to the Independent, held a fellowship in the School of World Art Studies and Museology at UEA; Dr STEFAN MUTHESIUS, architectural and design historian, teaches at UEA.