Catz featured in New Book about 1960s University Architecture

St Catherine’s College has recently been featured in another architectural book. 1960s University Buildings: The Golden Age of British Modern Architecture by John Barr examines how new ideas about education met new ideas about architecture, creating a golden age of British Modernism.

The 1960s continues to hold an almost mythical place in British culture. Change was widespread, and the role of architecture in a modern democracy and the form it should take were hotly debated. This book discusses the ideas of the time through an examination of its university buildings. While there were notable buildings being built in other spheres, no other field of architecture provided the opportunity to express those ideas as freely, while also reflecting innovative new thinking about education and society. Somehow, the university buildings of the 1960s seemed to represent the cutting edge of modern architecture in the UK.

In the aftermath of the First World War, there was a call for a new society and a new architecture to serve it. Following the Second World War, a new generation of architects felt that we had drifted away from those principles, and they sought a reset. Study of the university buildings of the 1960s allows us to measure how much our values as a society have changed since then and what we might have lost or allowed to fall by the wayside.

The book was published by Lund Humphries on 18th June 2025.

To read more of the author’s reflections on this exciting project, please click here.
To read more about the book, please click here.