Exeter. The sticky out windows near the top was a cafe. It became Debenhams. As the high street runs along a ridge, the Bobbys building was already at a high and was about the tallest building in the town along with the Norman Cathedral towers, from the cafe with its floor to ceiling windows it was like dining from a martian spacecraft hovering over the city and you could see for miles! Heady days and great knickerbocker glorys ......
nowt wrong with a bit of Mannerism, Mr. Tect. Just because it's so cold up there that the curly bits drop off your buildings doesn't mean we can't have a laugh.....
Florey was still in use in 1988, and, for that matter, is still in use today. I doubt it has ever been fully out of use - there isn't an awful lot of space in Oxford for 100 first-year undergraduates.
Yes, that's what we thought, too. But the Official Word (from the college Director of Development, who has access to the college archives, and no doubt has reviewed much of the correspondence) is that that is an urban legend. (Only in Oxford would you get an architectural urban legend). Apparently the building as built was more or less as designed - but the front door was supposed to be at the front, on the river side. But the landowners (Magdalen, I believe - no doubt jealous of its older cousin's affrontery in building a modern building opposite the deerpark) wouldn't release the land that Queen's required.
I'm sat in a Rogers-designed all-glass building right now, it has very clever wings and stuff to deflect airflow etc and....
At this distance from the original construction he's got no real axe to grind! Neither he nor his audience of 40-somethings were alive when Stirling was doing the dirty.
It doesn't. But you'd have to have the eye of a mole and no regard at all for the future occupants to design that particular building facing out on to St Clements rather than Magdalen meadow.
