Welsh government grants grade II status to three post-war buildings at the University of Cardiff

The Welsh government has listed three post-war buildings at the University of Cardiff following support from the Twentieth Century Society.

Percy Thomas’ Redwood Building, Alex Gordon’s School of Music and Faulkner-Brown Hendy Watkinson Stonor’s Arts and Social Sciences Library have all been granted grade II status.

The three buildings were recognised as outstanding examples of post-war modernist architecture characteristic of an expansion of higher education development in Wales from the 1950s to the early 1970s.

The Redwood Building was among the last projects completed by Percy Thomas - the founder of Percy Thomas Partnership - before he was forced to retire due to illness.

Opened in 1961 by the Duke of Edinburgh, it is Wales’ only College of Advanced Technology, a post-war programme aiming to stop the UK falling behind the technological progress of the US and the USSR.

The building is considered a significant example of austere 1950s modernism with its simplified Portland stone facade, only interrupted by a large relief sculpture above the main entrance designed by Edward Bainbridge Copnall.

The School of Music, built in 1971, was among the first of a series of modernist brick-clad buildings built for the university by Alex Gordon and Partners’ during the 1970s.

The Twentieth Century Society said it was among the “best works” by the practice, describing it as “austere, finely detailed and uncompromisingly Modernist”.

The building features minimal vertical slit windows on its frontage and a projecting central canopy over the main entrance, with an adjacent 1968 bronze sculpture by Barbara Hepworth - also listed at grade II - called “Three Obliques”.

The most recent of the three newly listed buildings is the 1975 Arts and Social Sciences Library, designed in a Brutalist style by Harry Faulkner Brown.

The four-storey building was the last major higher education scheme in Cardiff completed before the full onset of the economic turmoil of the 1970s, and was never finished as originally planned.

Only the first phase of the library was built, leaving an asymmetric building which had been envisaged as square in plan and almost double the size as what was completed.