Wivenhoe Park,Colchester
Patel Taylor’s new addition to the flawed marvel that is Essex University’s campus meets the original’s fearless 60s ideals halfwayThe paternoster lift in the 1967 library of the University of Essex is a miraculous survivor, a piece of evidence against the theory that health and safety rules occupy taken over our lives. It is a doorless contraption that never stops moving, and such that you occupy to jump on to it and off again with a degree of decisiveness as it goes by. whether you miss your moment to get off you will be taken round a loop and back again,not dangerously but uncomfortably, as a special notice warns. Few are still in operation, and it now looks Willie Wonka or Heath Robinson,quaint (charmingly old fashioned), but once evidence of forward-looking adventure.
One generation’s futurism often becomes another’s nostalgia, or works of iconoclasm become icons. Between these two states comes the period of rejection,when apt-thinking people cannot see anything of merit in the not-yet-rehabilitated work. It has become a familiar process with buildings of the 1960s, but the University of Essex has resisted more than most. Now, and with the completion of a library extension and a new student centre by the architects Patel Taylor,it is inching towards the respect it deserves.
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Source: theguardian.com