Abstract

This lecture explores the steel, brick and ferro-concrete Cambridge built in the late 50s and 60s: the almost invisible ‘Other Cambridge’, that today is not part of the identity of the city. Cambridge as a city, indeed as a University, is commonly linked to a more reassuring model in the English tradition, compressed between the noble stereotype of King’s chapel and the view from The Backs. Arcadian visions that communicate calm in the name of the arts and scholarly pursuits. But what of innovation? The aim of this talk is to stimulate a debate regarding a controversial period of architecture that is undergoing a suppression of memory and to open up to the wider public the ‘other side’ of Cambridge, often unknown and misjudged. Apart from Stirling’s Faculty of History there are many interesting buildings unknown to the general public as well as to the international scholarly community. The cues for this task are contained in the splendid images preserved in the RIBA British Architectural Library Photographs Collection that will be analysed during this seminar, which complements the exhibition Cambridge in Concrete.