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Churchill is very much, as its master, Nuclear Physicist Sir John Cockcroft, specified, an institution "for its own time and place." The campus landmark is a vaulted concrete roof that soars over the dining hall. Churchill's modernistic blocks and grass courtyards are sprinkled with flower boxes and brick planters, and so arranged as to provide pleasingly shifting views of planes, light and shadow.
To some, Jacobsen's Scandinavian-modern tableau is out of place in Oxfordshire. The London Sunday Times noted wryly that St. Catherine's "dining hall at night has a suggestion of the Troll King's Palace in Peer Gynt." Against such uncompromising foreignness and severity, Churchill may well be the greater esthetic work—managing honest charm and beauty without contrived tension. But in their functional purposes, both designs are being equally well received. Above all, they are of the present with a thrust toward the future; the atmosphere suggests strongly that the student is there to function. And the new horizons are spreading. Oxford's Brasenose has erected an undergraduate residence hall that is almost Japanese in its modernity, and at St. Anne's, an Oxford women's college, a new dormitory scheme reflects the ultramodern "chocolate-bar esthetic" rooms raised on the facade like the squares of a Cadbury's.