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Social Structures: Gillespie, Kidd & Coia’s Halls of Residence for the University of Hull

By looking at one case study building complex by the Glasgow architectural firm Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, the Lawns at Hull University, Proctor’s article examines the situation of the firm’s work in the architectural and social context of its period in the mid-1960s. The article argues that their architectural engagement with Team 10 and the New Brutalism demanded that their work reveal the social conditions of its production. The article shows how this occurred at the Lawns through a detailed examination of the processes of commissioning and funding the building in relation to the architectural expression of these processes. Archive research was conducted in the Gillespie, Kidd & Coia archive and at the Archives of the University of Hull, and the argument was placed within the current research context of work on post-war British modern architecture and university architecture. This article emerged out of Robert Proctor’s research on the twentieth-century Glasgow firm of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, whose archive is housed at GSA, and was part of a wider research effort undertaken on the firm by Proctor and colleagues at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, including an exhibition at the Lighthouse in Glasgow and an edited book, both funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, and two previous academic articles and several conference papers by Proctor. The article resulted from an invited lecture Proctor delivered at University of Glasgow’s Department of History of Art in 2008.