A friend asked me to answer this question: What is the full name of the person who said that it "makes its contribution to the Oxford skyline without any overt reference to historical precedent?, using the article: The architectural writer Geoffrey Tyack has written that Nuffield College was Oxford's "most important architectural project of the immediate post-war years". Opinions about the architecture merits of the college have varied, although most have been unfavourable. The authors of a 1961 booklet on the architecture of modern Oxford said that it was "Oxford's biggest monument to barren reaction". 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". 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". 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". Peter Sager, too, thought that the "high-rise library" could "easily stand on the Hudson". 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".  Of the flèche, Colvin said that it "makes its contribution to the Oxford skyline without any overt reference to historical precedent". 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".The architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner compared the college unfavourably to the designs of the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen  for St Catherine's College, Oxford, construction of which began in 1960 (the year that Nuffield College was completed): St Catherine's, in his view, was "the most perfect piece of..., what would be the answer ?



Howard Colvin