The only way is Essex University

We are told this is now a ‘knowledge economy’. Strange, then, that there are so few recent educational buildings of note. An expansion of universities has not led to much enlightened architectural patronage. Rather the opposite, in fact. The university visual trope remains those dogged dreaming spires. And London’s skyline is punctuated not by grand monuments to learning but by the swaggering, leering one-liners of the global plutocracy.

These are thoughts that come to mind on the occasion of Essex University’s 50th birthday, a much more interesting anniversary than it first (rather bleakly) sounds. It is the subject of an engaged and engaging booklet, Something Fierce, and an on-campus exhibition curated by Jules Lubbock, Essex’s emeritus professor of art history.

Lubbock is an inspirational teacher and a contrarian of genius. I know: in an earlier life for both of us, he taught me. I fondly remember a lecture about Fra Angelico where he read explicatory passages from a book about cybernetic theory.