Jude Harris

The Welsh architect Dale Owen probably had a strong subconscious influence on my choice of career. I went to school just up the hill from Aberystwyth Arts Centre on the university campus, which Owen designed for the Percy Thomas Partnership. My sixth-form years were spent sneaking in there for lunch every day. The centre exploits its sloping site to present a very dramatic entrance facade, with amazing picture windows that look out over the roofscape of the town towards the sea. The hard landscaped entrance terrace offers equally stunning views.

There are a lot of brutalist features, such as boardmarked concrete and bold geometric forms, and a sculptural bell tower, which made it feel very modern to me. The building has been updated and added to, but Owen’s Great Hall remains the centrepiece.

It’s very difficult to use concrete in such a crafted way while meeting current energy requirements, which is one reason why it’s so important to preserve the brutalist buildings we have. They’re already moments in time. Another example I’ve come to know well is the University Centre in Cambridge by Howell Killick Partidge & Amis (HKPA). Jestico + Whiles is doing a feasibility study there, drawing on our work on the West Cambridge campus, where we are building the Ray Dolby Centre for the Cavendish Laboratory, and recently completed the West Hub – the university’s first publicly open coworking space (CQ 280).

In many ways, the University Centre was a precursor to the West Hub. It provided a meeting place for people who weren’t attached to colleges, such as research students and non-academic staff. There’s a dining hall, a roof terrace – which we hope to re-open – and common rooms. Early photos show studious men looking out over the river while they lounge around smoking pipes. It’s a brutalist building but with a softness to it.

The scale and materials are very human: the doors are timber, the stairs are finished in lead, and it has a beautiful exposed structural frame of chamfered beams and precast concrete “trees”. The cladding is very expressive, and quite ahead of its time. It’s Portland stone but with a porous, travertine-like texture. A grid of steel bolts clearly shows how the rainscreen cladding is fixed to the frame behind.

It will be a challenge to update to modern energy-efficiency standards – behind the stone panels there’s just 25mm of insulation. But it’s an extremely well-conceived building. We should treat it with the respect it deserves, while exploring how best to decarbonise it.

Jude Harris is a director of Jestico + Whiles

Photos John Donat / RIBA Collections