Space in Flux: An Analysis of College Green at Goldsmiths
Ruihan Xu
This short essay focuses on the largest area at Goldsmith. It is not a conspicuous space as the educational facilities do largely because it does not possess a concrete spatial form. Yet such a space lays a foundation for everyone to orient themselves.
I am talking about College Green (Fig. 1), a somewhat regular lawn with three sides surrounded by the university halls, while the remaining west side faces the city of London. According to the website, it seems College Green was part of a larger renowned architectural design commissioned by the Royal Naval School in 1843. [1] Robert Shaw was the architect who was responsible for the project.
Although the university halls and St. Donatt’s Road together set up the boundaries of the lawn, it is also true that the lawn, reversely, defines where and how the boundaries of its neighborhoods begin and end. How does one’s identity change from a social individual to a college student? How does one’s identity change from a parent to a professor? Where do the changes take place? Interestingly, such identical changes are aligned with the changes of social status, power, and discourses, making the issues even more complicated. In the case of Goldsmiths, one might argue that the lawn that spatially mediates the university and the street, faculties and pedestrians, on duty and off work, the inside and outside, spiritual and secular, vita contemplative and vita active.
In this sense, the lawn orientates not only the ways in which we enter or leave one realm from another but also from one identity to another. Every day, countless spatial transformations or identity shifts literally take place within the lawn, making College Green a fluid space that makes sense of itself by triggering potential changes. It is, to some extent, an empty space. It has no spatial demarcation or functional zoning. Yet, it is precisely spatial ambiguity that makes potential changes possible.
In the following papers, I would like to address the issues related to the spatial logic of College Green and the ways in which the lawn shape, though in a less perceivable way, in our body perception and political relationality.
College Green is located in front of the Richard Hoggart Building (Fig. 2). A slant axis line could be observed, separating the campus into two parts while making the lawn the center of the plan. Indeed, everyone needs to come across it, either directly or wanderingly, corporally or visually, before taking classes there. Keeping things spatially aligned with the axis means the moves of centralization. It is easy to tell who the key figure might be from a group photo. This principle also works for analyzing spaces. By putting a spatial unit in the center, perceptual attention functions as the resource—as if a currency or bet—distributed mainly in one place in which imbalance and hierarchy come into being. Power, therefore, rises in the spatial center. Following this logic of attention distribution, it is reasonable to assume that once people want to make a political voice, they will unhesitantly find the central stage and align themselves with the political attribute of the central space, on the one hand, and the authority will try everything to block their way to the center, on the other.
College Green is a space in flux, allowing dynamics and flows to happen. Hence, it makes little sense to assume that the boundaries between the lawn and hall, natural and civil, are always clearly demarcated. Instead, they are inter-penetrable. When spring comes, the greens extend their habitat to the façade of the buildings, whereas the students and faculty move their academic conservations on the grass (Fig. 3).
The flexibility of the space is also reflected in the close association with seasons and weather. And it affects student’s activities indirectly. During the winter, the freezing wind blows people off the lawn. The summer storm and thunder, as if a furious landlord, evicted all the occupants out of the grass. The fact that the outdoor space is susceptible to seasonality is in contrast to the halls in which teaching activities take place as usual because of the artificial weather conditioning system. And it is not accurate to name the space College Green because it will be yellow during the autumn and white after snowing in the winter. The vastness of the white color on such a flat field makes an alternative picturesque landscape, visually turning the lawn into a space of flexibility.
The flux of the lawn is not limited to itself. It infects the occupants in the space as well. Occupant might not be an ideal word since it overly signifies the physical situation in which something or someone processes a certain amount of volume in space. In contrast, inhabitant is a term that literally shows the cultural dimension of how space shapes us. The word etymologically comes from “Latin, inhabitare, from in- + habitare to dwell, frequentative of habēre to have.” [2] In this sense, inhabiting a space is similar to having habits in a space, where we self-cultivate our behaviors.
What would be the habits, or routines of behaviors that repeatedly occur in a subconscious manner, in the College Green? And how does the College Green make the inhabitants behave accordingly? The absence of furniture, for example, tables and chairs, forces us to either stand up or lie down, which cannot last for a long time due to the potential uncomfortableness. Sitting on the lawn without a chair would be a third option. Yet, from the physical anthropological point of reference, it seems the body condition of modern homo sapiens does not directly interact with a flat floor. Ideally, the interaction between the body and floor requires a piece of furniture that mediates the two. In this scenario, the absence of furniture in College Green requires us to move our bodies constantly, from lying to standing, walking to sitting. Indeed, if, on a bright day, one reads on the grass while facing up, her eye burns and hurts due to the direct light. If she faces down, the reading does not either last long because of the reflected light on the book pages. If she sits cross-legged, the lower limbs go numb. In order to keep the body feeling comfortable, one has to constantly change the ways in which she interacts with the space.
Usually, to make a space inhabitable, adding furniture is not enough. We need facilities as well. It is no surprise that the lawn does not have toilets or tap water. Egestion and digestion happen frequently. In this scenario, one has to leave College Green every once in a while. Interestingly, every time one comes in and out, she carries things in and out. It could be a gossip, an idea, or chips, which keeps the lawn constantly in flux and exchange. One might conclude, therefore, that the absence of furniture and facilities keeps the dynamic movement continuously running in the lawn space.
Fig. 1. College Green and the Grade II listed Richard Hoggart Building, c.1908. https://www.gold.ac.uk/about/history/
Fig. 2. A map of Goldsmiths.
Fig. 3. Ruihan Xu, College Green in the Spring, 2024.
