and reopened in 2012 as a combined four-star country house hotel and hotel school. The Edge Hotel School was originally a partnership between the university and the Edge Foundation and is now a department of the university. It is the UK's first working hotel school dedicated to the development of future leaders of the hotel, events and hospitality industry.
With its concrete architecture, the university is typical of England's 1960s universities and was heavily influenced by the international Brutalist architecture movement. Due to its particular form of architecture involving the use of prefabricated concrete and glass, the university is also referred to as a plateglass university.
The architect of the campus, Kenneth Capon of the Architects' Co-Partnership, took the Tuscan town of San Gimignano with its squares and towers as an inspiration (the university has six residential towers mainly for undergraduates, but the original plan was to build 29).
The landmark buildings include the residential towers, The Hexagon and the Albert Sloman library – which was selected as an 'icon of British design' by the Victoria and Albert Museum in its 2012 exhibition British Design 1948–2012. The library has one of the few still operating continuous-loop paternoster lifts in the country.
An exhibition called "Something Fierce" was created in The Hexagon to celebrate the university's 50th anniversary in 2014, reflecting on the university's founding vision and its relationship with its architecture. The exhibition was curated by art historian Jules Lubbock and director of the university's Art Exchange gallery. The university's original buildings were also featured in the Futures Found exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2017 which reflected on post-war architecture in the UK.
The Silberrad Student Centre and extension of the Albert Sloman Library completed in 2015 were designed to reflect the Brutalist architecture of the original campus buildings. The project was named RIBA Regional Building of the Year Award in 2016.
Essex …
