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ARCHITECTURE
The continuance during 1968 of restrictions on capital investment in building was reflected in less work for architects. The majority of their new commissions were for buildings in the hospital or educational government-sponsored programmes and in housing.
Architecture continued to flower at the expanding universities, the majority of which had buildings under construction during the year, as part of their continuing programmes. An important examination sports hall, by Williamson, Faulkner Brown & Partners, was completed in March at Kent University, Canterbury. In the same month Powell and Moya's design for the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University was made public. The building was to contain the museum's extensive col- lection of archaeological and ethnological specimens on two main gallery levels, circular in form, with a rotunda covering a plant house rising out of the centre. The ferro-concrete tracery of the rotunda was typical of the work of Pier Luigi Nervi who was engaged as structural engineer. Powell and Moya were also architects for Wolfson College, Oxford, detailed sketch designs for which were made public in October. The new college, for graduate scientists, was unusual in the provision of consider- able accommodation for families living in. A new building in Oxford for St Hilda's was also announced in October. The sketch design by Alison and Peter Smithson showed a distinguished four-storey building to accommodate 51 undergraduate women and one tutor on a site near Magdalen Bridge. The history faculty building at Cambridge by James Stirling, a development from the engineering building at the University of Leicester (see AR 1964, p. 442), was occupied in October. The first phase of the new University of Surrey (Building Design Partnership), near Guildford Cathedral, was completed, and in the autumn students began to move in from temporary accommodation in Battersea.
Evidence of the growth of new ideas in health buildings came from the Ministry of Health in April: two new kinds of hospital were to be built at Bury St Edmunds and Frimley, wherein patient care over the whole range of existing services from hospital and public health to the general practitioner was to be catered for. A new kind of health centre, accommodating private practitioners and local authority health needs,
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was completed at Mansfield...