Transformation In Process

Yun-Chen Hsu

 ​​I heard that the Department of Visual Cultures may disappear according to the Transformation Programme proposed by the Senior Management Team. The university is going through a radical restructuring. Rumors have it that as well as the claim of redundancies in the teaching faculty, the department itself is going to be merged with the Department of Art. Moving to a Faculty framework, “Departments as they are today will no longer exist,” as the Students’ Union indicates. 

But what does it mean to “no longer exist”? I wondered. I imagined: The webpage from which I first learned about the course I am now studying would probably be gone or at least be renamed. The acronym VC will perhaps lose its meaning within the school system. It is likely that I will be one of the last students to graduate from the Department of Visual Cultures. Foreseeing a halt to the flow of what we have been used to, inevitably, for the staff and the students alike, we all feel, more or less, a sense of losing control of our careers, our promised university lives, and our futures.

The Transformation Programme’s effects do not stop in these abstract concepts, though. That the Department of Visual Cultures will become something else also means: When you go up from stairwell C in the Richard Hoggart Building, you will not see the sign of visual cultures anymore. The corridor once occupied by the visual cultures staff and students will be emptied out, and then these rooms and boards will be assigned for other uses. That the space where now the department is located will still be there is at the same time a true proposition and a false one. It is true in the sense that the material construction remains, but with different people gathered there minding different affairs, the places, as David Harvey suggests, will never be the same spaces at the relative and relational level.

The Transformation Programme was once an idea, then a project, a plan for financial rearrangement, a controversy, a meeting and then several more meetings, and finally it will become a spatial redistribution. The virtual will translate into the perceptual. The passage of “before-after” entailed by the concept of “transformation” is to be embodied by the transition of the ownership of a piece of space. We are losing control over the space as well. The temporal thus translates into the spatial. 

According to Goldsmiths’ Annual Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 31 July 2023, fifteen new programmes were approved for launch in September 2023. Where are these programmes? What spaces do these programmes take? How do they travel from a curriculum and some virtual files in the computer to flesh and equipment, to something tangible that takes up spaces? Are some other new programmes going to take over the spaces occupied by the current VC department? The Department of Visual Cultures was established in the year 2004/05; what were these spaces before that? 

I don’t know what people from the year 2003 would see when they went up the staircase C in the RHB building, but I do, after some research, know that the constructions that today are named after Richard Hoggart were first erected in 1843 to house the Royal Naval School. After the Royal Naval School decided to move to Mottingham in 1890, the Goldsmiths’ Company acquired the site and building and transformed it into the Goldsmiths’ Company’s Technical and Recreative Institute. The traces of the transfer of the building’s ownership are still palpable not only in terms of the name the college is known for today, Goldsmiths, but also in the material side of the campus.

While offering courses in various subjects, from applied mechanics, art, needlework, carpentry, and French, to mathematics, modeling, swimming, photography, typewriting, and more, the institute functioned as a site for recreative and social activities. On the base of the old structure, the company built a new gym, and a swimming bath, and on what used to be the Naval School’s parade ground a great hall was constructed. There were diverse clubs and societies, choir performances, organ recitals, and regular sports matches. The quad today was an open field then, used by the Naval students as a playfield and a tennis court by the students at Goldsmiths’ Institute. In 1904, the company made a deal with the University of London to offer the Institute to the university. 

After that, it was decided that Goldsmiths’ campus should become a Teacher Training College and a School of Art. An Evening Department was founded later. In the 1960s, the college underwent another series of major transformations as the result of a change in education policies regarding the elongation of the school teachers’ training course, which made the expansion of the College essential as more students were needed to produce enough teachers for the schools. To accommodate more students and staff, new buildings were erected. In 1968, the Whitehead building was built. The next year, the Warmington Tower went up, and the Lockwood building came into being in 1972. The main building itself underwent several reorganisations as well. Again, an abstract institutional change took physical shapes.

It is interesting that these spatial pasts seldom come into play in our analysis and experience of a space. Take Deptford Town Hall for example. Deptford Town Hall was built between 1902 to 1907, and that became the site for the local Deptford Council. During the Second World War, as the campus met serious damage from bombing and the teaching had long been relocated to Nottingham, the College’s future seemed dim, and little expected it to return to New Cross. The Deptford Council put forward an intention to purchase the college site and develop it into a new community centre. The proposal was opposed by the Warden of the time and the Board of Education. Had it passed successfully, our college might have found a new campus in Nottingham or somewhere else, and we might still go to Goldsmiths’ College, but our essential experiences of the college cannot be what we have now. In 1963, the Deptford Borough Council was merged into Lewisham, and the College acquired the building together with the Laurie Grove Baths in 1998. This reverse takeover is intriguing, but neither do students who rush into the council building for their classes are aware of it nor does it have any significant influence on them. Similarly, I have no idea who was using the VC spaces before the department was founded, and that does not matter. I do not expect later students to know, or to care, about what the spaces are like now, either. 

But just like Harvey’s use of human subjects (a speaker in a room, a New Yorker, etc) as examples for the three different modes of spatial experiences in “Space as a Keyword,”, the history of the space can be easily incorporated into his conceptions of space if it is considered in a way as if the space is also a subject bringing its own story into the encounter. In Harvey’s definitions of relative space and relational space, where temporality is introduced into spatial relationship, space is portrayed as a point of horizontal convergence where individual histories, frames of reference, external and internal stimuli, and various relations meet to define it. The vertical accumulation of spatial data definitely plays a part in the formation of an experience of space, too.  

While we may not be directly affected by spatial pasts, they can haunt the present through architecture. When conceiving the expansion of the college in the 1960s, Ross Chesterman, the Warden then, was troubled by the two main corridors of the main building. He attributed the design to the Training Department’s intention to separate male and female students (which was in fact done much earlier than the establishment of the department with the field in the middle functioning as the parade ground of the navy, as I have explained above, but can fittingly serve this purpose without a doubt), which became a hindrance to the management of the increasing traffic flow of multiplying students. The Council chamber of the Town Hall still carries a sublime ambiance and seriousness with it, and the building’s external sculptures of former naval figures ignited protests against imperialism, colonialism, and insensitivity toward the history of transatlantic trade among members of the College. The chronological record of what happened in a space, who was in the space, and how a space came into being shape one’s engagement with the space at an almost subconscious level. 

At Goldsmiths, material structures serve as remnants of feelings and documents of change in many respects. Plans for the campus embody plans for the College. The purposes of the College, the visions, the crises, and the hopes are encapsulated in every new and re- construction, refurnishing, and acquirement of the buildings.  

One morning, I decided to have a campus tour. I looked for the offices of all the departments we have now and paid every office a visit. The Department of Art is located in the 2005-built Ben Pimlott Building. In the Professor Stuart Hall Building, which opened in 2010, I found the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship (ICCE) and the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Department. None of them are in the scope of redundancies. These new buildings somehow reflect the protocol of the Transformation Programme. 

Transformation is always in process.

Bibliography

Harvey, David. “Space as a Keyword.” In David Harvey: A Critical Thinker, edited by Noel Castree and Derek Gregory, 270-293. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Chesterman, Ross. Golden Sunrise: The Story of Goldsmiths’ College 1953-1974. Durham: The Pentland Press, 1996.

Firth, A.E. Goldsmiths’ College: A Centenary Account. London: The Athlone Press, 1991.

Dean, A.E. “Fifty Years of Growth.” In The Forge: The History of Goldsmiths’ College 1905-1955, edited by Dorothy Dymond, 1-70. London: Metheun & Co, 1955. 

The main site of the College, September 1987. Firth, A.E, Goldsmiths’ College: A Centenary Account (London: The Athlone Press, 1991), 124.