Suffolk Terrace and adjoining walkway and stairs to rear, at the University of East Anglia

Suffolk Terrace and adjoining walkway and stairs to rear, at the University of East Anglia

Four linked blocks of student accommodation with facilities for resident tutors, built 1964–1968 by Denys Lasdun and Partners. Lasdun was commissioned in 1962 to produce a master plan for the newly founded University of East Anglia.

The buildings employ cross-wall concrete construction with precast panels manufactured on site. External walls are 10 inches thick, with 6-inch loadbearing crosswalls within. Internal joints are recessed; external joints have neoprene baffles and damp proof backing. Roof units are Siporex precast concrete. The terrace comprises seven storeys with a service tower, though the sloping site means no part rises more than five storeys at any single point. The stepped section and the continuous profile, with each block set at 90 degrees to the next, gives the terrace its common name of "ziggurat". Each block itself terminates in a 90-degree corner ending in a concrete gargoyle.

Each block contains a flat on each floor accommodating up to twelve students, with ten single rooms and one shared unit in the concave angle, plus a shared kitchen in the projecting corner. Bathrooms and storage areas occupy the rear. Smaller flats for graduates and resident tutors sit at the top of each block. Each floor is set back behind the one below and lowered so that the roof level of the lower flat aligns with the sill level of that above. This arrangement reduces ceiling heights in the rear portions, requiring shorter access stairs of twelve steps between floors. Internal staircases at the centre of each block lead from each flat to a rear walkway at the level of the uppermost flat (though only the third floor at the rear), which runs over bicycle and car parking areas. Escape stairs, of dog-leg shuttered concrete construction, are positioned at each end of the range. Continuous timber windows to the south feature two halves with a horizontal sliding section, forming an important part of the striking composition of stepped-back vertical and repetitive horizontal grid. Students' units have fitted cupboards to the rear of each room.

The University of East Anglia was founded in 1960. Lasdun was commissioned as consultant architect in April 1962 for a site comprising 165 acres of parkland on Norwich's edge, previously used by the local authority as a golf course and flanked by the River Yare (which was dammed to form a lake around 1977). Lasdun was committed to preserving the flat, marshy, and very open valley landscape; the ziggurats are positioned where the valley begins to rise in service of this aim. His objective was a "five-minute university" in which departments and student accommodation would be concentrated on a compact site, contrasting with the "ten-minute university" concept that Chamberlin, Powell and Bon had developed for their 1960 expansion scheme at Leeds. Both UEA and Leeds adopted the principle of the continuous teaching block, a concept developed almost concurrently and independently in North America, particularly Canada.

Lasdun's scheme, published in May 1963, envisioned development accommodating up to 6,000 people over fifteen years, with ziggurats and a long spinal teaching block already recognisable in form, though more complex and extensive than what was ultimately built. The accommodation of students in independent flats, separate from a collegiate system, represented a new departure in allowing students greater freedom within a "family unit" of their peers. The stepped form draws on Sant'Elia's drawings for "Casa a gradinate" and Marcel Breuer's 1928 scheme for a hospital at Elberfeld, which featured a stepped section and upper gallery for rear access.

The expression of services as rooftop sculpture reflects Lasdun's awareness of Louis Kahn's Richards Medical Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as his own earlier projects. His 1960 scheme for Churchill College, Cambridge, had already employed similar terraces, as did his built work at Christ's College and proposals for the Cripps Building at St John's, both Cambridge (1962). Sir Leslie Martin had similarly experimented with stepped terraces at these locations and at Leicester. UEA was Britain's first and most successful expression of a university conceived as a small city rather than a dispersed campus, and was influential internationally, particularly on Giancarlo de Carlo and the Team 10 members Josic, Candilis, and Woods, who shared Lasdun's interest in clustered communities.

The powerful sculptural forms of the Lasdun UEA buildings demonstrate consistent detail throughout the building programme and reflect a single-minded effort to ensure high-quality maintenance-free exteriors and internal elements within permitted cost levels. Of all the new universities of the 1960s, UEA's architecture has most consciously created a visual impression of experiment and enquiry without recourse to bizarre forms or materials, and notably without academic architecture. The scheme succeeds because it possesses a front and back and counterpart space, harnessing repetition as a unitary living idea.