From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In 1940, the architectural historian John Summerson wrote a wonderful essay about his ‘luminous and liberating’ time as one of 11 pupils attending a tiny boarding school at Riber Castle, a stately home in Derbyshire. Riber was a ‘castellar hulk’, a ‘big and comfortless’ Victorian Gothic pastiche built by an industrialist and ‘decorated with the naive barbarity of a methodist turned Caliph’. It filled the boys’ minds with ‘delicious horrors and shocking impossibilities’. Summerson loved it, and it was there his passion for architecture first stirred. He called his essay ‘The Unromantic Castle’.
The lesson is that a building doesn’t have to be gracious, or even functional, to be special. James Stirling’s History Faculty Building at the University of Cambridge could not be more different to Riber in style, but it too is an unromantic castle. Completed in 1968, it has been plagued by functional problems ever since, all of which I enjoyed first hand as a student in the 1990s. This had made it, for some, an emblem of the failings of modern architecture in general, and in 1985 it had escaped demolition by one vote in the University Senate. But now £60 million has been pledged towards a major refit. At last, the History Faculty might be able to put its troubled past behind it.
The History Faculty is one of the famed ‘Red Trilogy’ of university buildings that Stirling produced in the 1960s (in brilliant, fissile partnership with James Gowan until 1963), along with the Engineering Department at the University of Leicester and the Florey accommodation building for Queen’s College in Oxford. That trio is an architectural genre of its own, unlike almost anything else before or since, individually very different, but with strong family resemblance: orange-red brick or tile, copious glazing, structural daring and unmistakeable profiles.
Of the trilogy, the Cambridge building is the hardest to love, lacking the elan of the Leicester engineering department and the compact charm of the Florey. It is a six-storey L-shaped tower containing offices and lecture rooms, said to resemble an open book. In the middle of this L spills a ziggurat of faceted glass, which covers the reading room of the Seeley Library. A neat red-tiled lift tower, a trademark of the trilogy, serves as turret; a glacis and the sunken area that shields the book stacks serve as perimeter defence. All the upward thrust of the tower and the pyramid of glass cannot overcome the weight of the ground-level buildings; where Leicester soars, Cambridge squats; where the Florey encloses, the history faculty sprawls.
Inside, for all its seasonal discomforts, the Seeley library was an extraordinary place to work. The corridors of the upper floors of the buildings looked down on to the reading room, and Stirling and Gowan gave them protruding ‘bays’ to encourage the building’s users to stop and look. From the library below, these balconies still have considerable futuristic dash, combined with a touch of the medieval oriel window. Lines of sight were central to the design. The faculty’s main entrance hall looked onto the library, making at least one part of the building instantly legible. During the 1985 debate – according to a contemporary account by Deyan Sudjic – Stirling heard a professor likening this layout to ‘an Edwardian hotel’: from the front desk in the lobby ‘Either you go up to your room, or you pass beyond, into the tea lounge, with the light coming from above, and no doubt a palm court orchestra playing.’
The quarter-circle of library itself – the ‘tea lounge’ – was designed as a panopticon, with the librarians’ desk by the central pillar, where there are uninterrupted views across the reading room, into both levels of book stacks at the outer radius of the open space. As you would expect, natural light was never an issue in this palm court, but my abiding memory of it is in the early nights of winter, when the steel-and-glass vaults disappeared in the gloom, and you were left in the pool of light of your desk, in a vast gothic space. Even the building’s curiosities of plan, its half-floors and nonsequiturs, gave it a sense of mystery, making it a place of hidden areas and secret passages. There was no denying the building’s problems, but that was quite salutary. It didn’t ladle on the charm. Its pleasures were more rugged and, well, unromantic.
Hopefully future historians will find it a little easier. The building’s original sin was that it was rotated 90 degrees to fit into a slightly smaller site than had originally been allocated. This avoided a more disruptive redesign, but moved the main entrance away from the pedestrian spine of the Sidgwick Site, Cambridge University’s post-war humanities campus at the edge of the city centre, masterplanned by Casson Conder Partnership. More damagingly, the library glasshouse was turned towards the south, and the sun.
‘We went up to the top floor on our first site visit and the temperature up there was 50 degrees,’ says Jessica Mailey, architect director at BDP, the practice in charge of the refit. ‘You would put your hand on the steelwork and go “ow”.’ Mailey adds that there were 19 buckets across the library, coping with the various leaks. Many of these problems, BDP has learned, were not caused by the design as such, but by the crudities of construction. The steel frame supporting the extraordinary glass roof of the library ‘was kind of hammered into place’, and its joints were not sealed properly. This steel will be removed in sections and reinstalled, with improved glazing and ventilation. Meanwhile circulation and access problems are being fixed with understated ground-level pavilions.
But the glory of that central cathedral of reading will be retained. The main desk is being moved, making the heart of the building less focused on centralised surveillance, and opening up new sight lines. No one should have to shiver or sweat through their studies, but one hopes that not all the building’s quirks and mysteries will be eradicated. Summerson found the ‘raw, uncouth’ qualities of Riber Castle more exciting and unforgettable than the sedate Georgian buildings of his other school. When he wrote his essay about it, Riber was a ruin; its shell has since been filled with apartments. Fortunately the difficult middle child of the Red Trilogy survives and may yet thrive.
From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.