Bernard Feilden and David Luckhurst’s Completion of Lasdun’s UEA

Feilden took care to adhere to Lasdun’s landscape concept, and this meant chiefly not to build on those grounds which Lasdun stiplulated as landscape surroundings. Under Feilden the University most attractively, and at no extra cost, extended, as intended by Lasdun very early on, its landscaped grounds by creating a ‘Broad’ – the Norfolk term for lakes and inland waterways. Feilden’s summary comment on his task was ‘…I take account of contexts. My values are flexible, but, although I fitted in with what Lasdun built, I took my own line entirely on site development…From a town planning, a circulatory aspect, the basic plan for the campus was a mess’. Feilden was referring to his chief task to complete the University’s centre…Frank Thistlewaite remarked that ‘the university has been built without a heart’. By late 1971 Feilden and his designers had proved it…it meant a departure from Lasdun’s planning ideals…with a crucial difference as regards the perceived behaviour of the user. Lasdun, according to Feilden, conceived of his users at UEA as ‘walking briskly; Feilden emphasized the stationary, the lingering, the sitting down.

Extract from Concrete and Open Skies – Architecture of the UEA 1962 -2000