Houses For Visiting Mathematicians Warwick University

A group of five houses and two flats built between 1968 and 1970 for visiting academics attending mathematics symposia at Warwick University. They were designed by William Howell of the architectural practice Howell, Killick, Partridge and Amis.

The buildings are constructed from yellow-faced Stourbridge bricks with a red core, featuring timber window surrounds and flat, felted roofs. All external corners are rounded. The five individual houses are arranged around a central circular lawn and joined by low walls flanking their front doors. Each house is two storeys with a single-storey porch, store and laundry room at the front and a single-storey study to the rear. The two-storey block of flats contains two units and has no study extension. Both houses and study blocks are square on plan with height approximately equal to their widths, creating a roughly cubic appearance.

Within each house, a central front door opens into a staircase hall leading to a living room incorporating a kitchen area. A link corridor with a lavatory provides access to the study at the rear. The first floor contains two bedrooms and a bathroom with generous fitted cupboards. The flat block is broadly similar in layout, except the living room area is divided to create a bedroom and living room. All principal windows are positioned facing clockwise to ensure privacy and prevent studies being overlooked from other rooms.

Externally, each block has a single-storey porch with a projecting entrance featuring a heavy lintel, the only opening on that face. The anti-clockwise face is largely blank except for small lavatory and bathroom windows and vents. The clockwise face has windows with chunky wooden frames serving the study, corridor, living room, bedrooms and laundry room, with the study and living room windows projecting from the body of the house, their flank walls also curved.

Inside, the brickwork is laid with emphatic horizontal joints and painted white throughout. Interior walls of the staircase and kitchen are curved to match the external corners, with the resulting space used for ducting from the first-floor bathroom. Original fitted cupboards to bedrooms, landings and passages remain unaltered, as does the original sanitary ware. Each block contains a winder staircase with cantilevered concrete treads set into the brick walls and metal balusters of square section with a simple plastic-covered handrail. The staircase and study both feature circular skylights with domed roofs, and each study retains its original blackboards encircling the room with their light fittings and chalk rests.

The design emerged from the vision of Christopher Zeeman, the first professor of Mathematics at Warwick University, who obtained an £88,000 grant from the Nuffield Foundation to establish a Mathematics Research Centre. Zeeman insisted each house must have a detached study where mathematicians could work undisturbed, with blackboards around the walls. His consultation with architect Bill Howell resulted in the innovative solution of building walls inward to address the corner problem, combined with lowering blackboards to allow children to use the bottom sections.

The architectural practice's partners first met while working at the London County Council Architects Department and subsequently collaborated on the Roehampton Lane Housing scheme in 1950. The constructional approach using brick walls, rounded corners and heavy lintels was previously developed in an unexecuted 1955 scheme for low-rise housing in Kensington. From certain angles the individual blocks resemble toy forts, reflecting Howell's sympathy for the playful designs of High-Victorian architect William Burges.

The Houses for Visiting Mathematicians won the RIBA Architecture Award in 1970. The grouping remains intact and represents a particularly strong architectural statement, combining practical considerations of privacy and family life with symbolic expression of a welcoming community. The intricate plan maximises the small space while demonstrating masterful use of materials and detailing, with the buildings' positioning at different compass points creating continuously shifting patterns of light across flat and sinuous surfaces.