Buildings of Distinction - The University of East Anglia - Norwich
Sep, 14 2025
Back in 1970 a student facility was built to cater for the needs of those that pursued higher education. As principal architect Denys Lasdun the University of East Anglia – Norwich was designed to enrich student’s lives pursuing the career they dreamt about at high school.
It is a true megastructure built to include –
- Student accommodation
- A teaching block of offices
- Labs and lecture theatres
- A library
- Students’ union building
The teaching block is a long, winding ribbon with a strong horizontal emphasis and appealing copper hued windows. The horizontal is broken up by Lasdun’s characteristic roof furniture – concrete housed vents and lift shafts jutting dramatically above the roofline.
To the east of the site you can find the library and students’ union building, an arrangements of boxes that continue the horizontal thread. Running the length of this collection of buildings and facing south is the student accommodation, the famous ziggurats. Magnificent low rise stepped pyramids of concrete and glass.
The height of the buildings fall, step by step, to the ground and where the buildings end an area of grassland continues the downward slope to a small lake in front of the River Yare. Raised walkways – one of the favourite architectural features – connect the back of the ziggurats with the rest of the complex.
The campus is, in the true sense of the word, awesome. A miniature brutalist city sat next to a beautiful patch of green. The Sainsbury gallery to the west of the site is a bit intrusive, but the university has got to make the most of its estate I suppose. Plus it’s worth a wander round once you’ve finished looking at the architecture.
Take a look at this 1 minute film for a brief overview of the campus –
Every summer students consider a course here for either a year or several years aiming for a line of work which will set them up well for the future. For full courses and enrolment options simply visit the following website link –
In 1978, the gift of tribal art and 20th-century paintings and sculptures by artists such as Francis Bacon and Henry Moore from Sir Robert Sainsbury resulted in the construction of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, one of the first major public buildings to be designed by the architects Norman Foster and Wendy Cheesman. The building became Grade II listed in December 2012.
Fast forward to more modern times and in the mid 2010’s the Sainsbury Centre at UEA was used for filming several scenes in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-Man, Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming.
In 2015, "Britain's Greenest Building" (The Enterprise Centre) opened on campus using low-carbon local materials; it was featured in an exhibition at COP26 as one of the most exemplary sustainable building projects in the world. Also, Earlham Park played host between 23 and 24 May to BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend 2015 where acts such as Fall Out Boy, Muse, Foo Fighters and Taylor Swift performed.
A culturally significant building which remains the go to place for students to embark on a course which will lead to success. It’s also notable that it’s university with the intent to entertain either by film or music with an eco- friendly ethos at the core of its teaching. Whether you’re a young person or a mature adult there really is something for everyone at the University of East Anglia – Norwich.
^Alex Ashworth CCG UK Blogger
