Spence Beehive In Sussex

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31121, 26 July 1966, Page 15

Spence Beehive In Sussex

(From the London Correspndt. of “The Preu”) LONDON, July 14. Sir Basil Spence, the eminent British architect responsible for the Beehive idea for the extension to be built on New Zealand’s Parliament House, designed the new circular chapel and meeting house (shown in the accompanying photograph) which has just been completed at the University of Sussex.

When I asked Sir Basil Spence if he agreed that the new building also strongly resembled a beehive, he chuckled and said: “Well, it is more or less the same shape. Of course I have seen square beehives though, in fact I have seen many different shapes of beehives.” "More like a dovecote," was the blunt comment of a student at the university. "No I can’t say I like it, I don’t think it fits in with the other buildings. . . At first sight the Brighton

Planning Committee didn't like the look at the building either. They decided that the building was going to look too much like an oast house (which is the home of a hop-drying kiln). It was designed as a circular building with a conically shaped roof changing from a circle at the base to an inclined elliptical opening at the top. Sir Basil Spence admits that it looks like an oast house. “It’s not that I went to it as an oast house—l wanted that sort of roof for directional light inside the building ... on to the table.”

Sir Basil Spence said he felt that the chapel should be a circular building because it was in the University’s “great court.” “It probably is the same sort of thing that I thought when I suggested a circular building for your Parliament House. The whole genesis of the idea was the function of the building. The

Ministers had to get quickly to the chamber when the division bells rang—like a sort of fireman’s pole—also it was circular for earthquakes, because the building was right on the middle of a fault.” “The Sussex building had to be circular because it was a chapel—l wanted to get that feeling of community and togetherness.”

After the Brighton Planning Committee rejected Sir Basil Spence’s design because of its resemblance to an oast house, he asked to meet them. “I explained the whole thing to them, and then they agreed to it; they reversed their decision.

“As I was leaving the meeting I remember the Town Clerk whispered to me: *Sir Basil, what will you do when you’re asked to design an oast house?’ ‘Design a chapel,’ I told him.”

Sir Basil Spence said that he had already designed two other circular buildings which have been constructed in

r Britain, besides the University ! of Sussex’s £90,000 two-storey, i 80ft diameter chapel—meeting • house. They were a circular ■ lecture theatre also at the ; University of Sussex and a i Chapel at Coventry (“This one wasn't called a beehive,” i he said. “It was called a i dustbin.”) A circular building was [ really a very traditional form, said Sir Basil Spence. It was

a design used a great deal in classical times and the renaissance. The circular concrete form of his striking chapel at Sussex rests on brick piers. It has 2ft thick fenestrated walls made from a honeycomb pattern of large precast con-

crete blocks, profiled to accommodate coloured glass window panels set alternately forward and backward of the block face to achieve deep reveals both Internally and externally. The sheets of glass

are arranged in spectrum colour sequence with the brightest yellows to the north behind the altar.