‘The powerful sculptural forms of the Lasdun UEA make the university proud to find itself on the international circuit. The buildings themselves, however, should be seen not only as form-making and an intellectualised counterpoint between the building mass and the landscape; they give lessons in consistent detail throughout a wide-ranging building programme and illustrate a single-minded effort to ensure high quality maintenance-free exteriors and internal elements within permitted cost levels’ (Architects’ Journal, 14 June 1972, p.1334). Of all the new universities of the 1960s the architecture of UEA ‘has most consciously created a visual impression of experiment and enquiry, yet without the use of bizarre forms of materials, and notably without recourse to any academic architecture’ (Tony Birks and Michael Holford, Building the New Universities, 1972, p.73). ‘Why one likes Lasdun’s East Anglia student clusters is that they have a front and a back and a counter-part space – that it is a unitary living idea, harnessing repetition’ (Peter Smithson, p.481).

Listed: Grade II*

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