Buildings of Nuffield College, Oxford

[6] However, the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, although unimpressed with most of the college, thought that the tower helped the Oxford skyline and predicted it would "one day be loved".

[9] His plan was to create a college that specialised in engineering and business methods to provide a link between academia and industry, for which he initially offered the University £1 million;[n 3] £100,000[n 4] was used for a physical chemistry laboratory (completed in 1941), of which he approved.

[20] Eight architects were initially asked to compete, including Louis de Soissons, Vincent Harris, Austen Harrison, Charles Holden, Edward Maufe, and Hubert Worthington.

After Harrison's preliminary studies, it became clear that the proposed site could not contain a college and an institute for social science research as planned; Nuffield agreed to provide an additional plot of land on the opposite side of Worcester Street.

[23] The sub-committee recommended that Harrison's plans be adopted in January 1939, and a model of the design was shown to Nuffield in June 1939 – he had been abroad for much of the intervening period.

White Portland stone was the chosen building material; there were to be "stark" external walls and flat roofs, and a large semi-circular doorway at the main entrance, with facetted voussoirs demonstrating the influence of the Muslim architecture of Norman Sicily.

Although Harrison had not finished plans for the common rooms, the initial sketches had oriental touches, including fireplaces reminiscent of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul.

[25] Colvin said that the "relationship between the principal buildings" was "elegantly worked out" and, "in a university of self-contained spaces", a design using two intersecting axes – one from the entrance to the hall and tower, the other from the chapel to the lodging – "represented an innovation in planning that was highly effective".

[1] Harrison protested that the so-called Oxford architectural tradition was a vague concept and also an accident of history: there was no uniform style uniting the buildings of the university and colleges, but instead different designs had been used, with varying modifications, over many centuries.

The main entrance was moved from the west to the south of the college, under the chapel; it was to have an arcaded vestibule, allowing the quadrangle to be seen from the street, as Nuffield wanted.

[28] There were further changes to Harrison's second design, as not only had inflation between 1937 and 1949 reduced the value of Nuffield's original donation, but additional savings had to be made in the difficult post-war economic situation.

The plans of the tower were altered so that it would hold a library, instead of being purely ornamental, windows were added at regular intervals, and it was topped by a copper flèche, or small spire.

[24] Colvin commented that, apart from the flèche which was similar to the initial plan, the college as finally built contained none of the elements that had given Harrison's first design "interest and distinction".

[36] Dalwood also designed the fountain in the pool in the upper quadrangle, although his plan for a spray of water was not implemented, "leaving the sculpture with no obvious purpose".

Lord Nuffield's coat of arms are displayed over the fireplace, carved from a single piece of stone, and his portrait, painted by Sir Arthur Cope, hangs in the hall.

It has five abstract stained glass windows that were designed by John Piper and executed by Patrick Reyntiens, and a metal reredos with a bronze crucifix.

[4] The Cotswold style was "taken absurdly out of context and mercilessly stretched", and did not "harmonise with the clumsy tower", whilst the spire "[perched] uneasily ... despite its elaborate base".

[4] An unnamed journalist wrote in The Times in 1959 that the main buildings of the quadrangles were "somewhat oddly wedded to small basins which irresistibly suggest a Lilliputian Versailles".

[44] The same writer said that the tower rose "Manhattan-wise for 10 storeys through the twentieth century, only to have a diminutive spire, escaped from the fifteenth, push through its top to steal the last laugh".

[17] Sir Howard Colvin said that the "utilitarian function" of the tower "accorded ill with its original ornamental purpose", and that the architects had "failed to find a satisfactory solution" to the "repetitive uniformity of fenestration".

[27] Geoffrey Tyack also disliked the tower, describing it as "an ungainly structure" that was "lit by a monotonous array of windows punched out of the wall surface"; however, he thought the hall was "an effective reinterpretation of the traditional collegiate pattern".

[33] Nevertheless, he "proposed forgiveness" for the "mighty tower", which "positively helps the famous skyline of Oxford", adding that it has "enough identity to be sure that one day it will find affection".

[36] He said that the tower had something of the architect Edwin Lutyens' "felicitous manipulation of period details into a non-period whole and will, I prophesy, one day be loved", although he was less sure that this fate awaited the rest of the buildings.

"That a college devoted to modern scientific studies should be dressed up [in the style of an antique Cotswold manor house] has already been the subject of puzzled comment by many foreign visitors to Oxford.

"[42] The chapel was described by the travel writer Jan Morris as "one of the sweetest little sanctuaries in Oxford";[46] "very simple, almost stern" with a contrast between the black and white pews and the "rich colour" of the stained glass.

[46] However, she said that whilst Oxford colleges change in style over time as buildings are added or altered, "Nuffield was a hodge-podge from the start, with a faintly Levantine tower upon a Cotswold Gothic base".

[38] He said that the buildings "make a picturesque group of gabled Cotswold roofs", adding that "[t]heir design is simple and depends for its effects upon its just proportions.