Corporation Takes Command: The Project of the Sir John Cass Faculty of Architecture and Design between Complicity and Resistance

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, Bill Readings compared universities to business corporations, sounding the alarm for an incipient corporatization of the academy that has provoked commentary since. Under neoliberalism, public universities are run as private corporations striving to survive in the increasingly competitive higher education market. The spatial side of this phenomenon is an architectural portfolio consisting of corporate style reception desks, turnstile-controlled entrances, bookable meeting rooms, and café spaces to learn. This article examines “the slow death” of the university as a space of scholarship focusing on the Sir John Cass Faculty of Architecture and Design (or Cass) in Central House (2012–17), London. As a public university acting like a real estate operator in a large metropolis, the Cass displays both complicity and resistance toward the managerial logics of universities. Its resistance lies in the architectural reconfiguration of Central House, which was eventually defeated by the institution’s real estate ambitions.