"It was different" - Inside the abandoned Salford University building that won awards – and baffled staff
The Centenary Building was first building to win the RIBA Stirling Prize when it opened in 1996. Just 20 years later it was empty and unused.
In this week’s newsletter, we’ll take a look at the award-winning – and abandoned – building that’s slap-bang in the middle of one of Salford’s most valuable development opportunities and ask: whatever happened to the Centenary Building?
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‘Footsteps clanging on the metal stairs’ - whatever happened to the Centenary Building?
The University of Salford’s campus has seen huge expansion over the past two decades, with the addition of MediaCity and bold plans to rethink the Peel Park campus around Salford Crescent. However one teaching building, less than 30 years old and the world’s first winner of the Stirling Prize – the most prestigious architecture award in the UK – now lies empty.
Behind the vast expanse of the Farmer Norton car park, the gleaming mirage of the Centenary Building peaks through Peru Street’s guard of trees. Located just next door to the university’s previous School of Media, Music & Performance, the Adelphi Building (acquired by the University, then called the Salford Royal College of Advanced Technology, in 1962), these teaching spaces seem long forgotten just a hundred yards from the regeneration of Chapel Street.
Designed in 1995 by architect Stephen Hodder, the Centenary Building was commissioned as a ‘fusion of design and technology’ to house the School of Electrical Engineering, before its change of use, during construction, to the Faculty of Art and Design Technology. With a deadline of only 11 weeks to complete the design process, thanks to a looming European Union grant deadline, Hodder created “a dynamic, modern and sophisticated exercise in steel, glass and concrete”, according to the Stirling Prize Jury, which hailed its ‘air of purpose and animation’.
Featuring state-of-the-art teaching rooms, technology suites, seminar rooms and video-editing software, the building was commended for its innovative design, winning the RIBA Award (the inaugural Stirling Prize) in 1996 and the Civic Trust Award in 1997. Architects loved the Centenary Building.
The building was, perhaps, not striking from the outside. But the interior veered between surreal, innovative and baffling. Metal stairs meant sound reverberated around the building; kitchen facilities amounted to drinking-water taps in the public lavatories. Windows that were hard to close made for an appealing invitation for Salford’s pigeons, resulting in frantic emails around the university, following another atrocity by the city’s birds. Head down to the basement and a subterranean tunnel connected Centenary and Adelphi; a perspex roof meant visitors to the car-park could peer down into this underground link.
Salford University technical services manager Martin Hughes worked at the building as a Product Design lecturer from 2000. He said: “Centenary was different. It was like our flagship building and everybody loved to look around it. Even now, when I do tours of MediaCity, you forget the environment you’re in. That’s how it felt with Centenary: when you showed people around, they couldn’t believe the facilities we had.”
However, criticisms of the building being “quickly and cheaply built” were quickly levelled at the building, which staff and students began to feel was unsuited to its use.
Martin Hughes continues: “The building wasn’t always up to standard. The underfloor heating never worked and I remember when I went into the building, I touched the window and the actual window moved.
“There were always issues around its building and construction. Some students thought it looked like a prison block with metal walkways, but some liked it because it was something we could adapt and it had that industrial chic vibe.
“One thing that was always picked up was the disconnect we had from the main campus, it was a fair way down the Crescent. Gradually it felt like we were cut off. But then again, some people liked the remoteness of it, and we had good car parking.”
Professor Steven Davismoon had an office at Centenary in the years before it was closed and taught music at the nearby Adelphi building. He remembers some aspects of the building fondly.
“I did enjoy the outlook from my office,” he says. “The big window was nice; the light that would seep in from many points of the building.
“Centenary would have been completely unfit for teaching music due to its complete lack of sound insulation. You could literally hear conversations quite easily up and down the corridors, which was good and bad…!”
Dr Carole O’Reilly, formerly a lecturer at Salford and author of the book Salford in 50 Buildings, recalls that Centenary “never suited its purpose, the architects being focused on concept and design.”
“My abiding memory is an aural one – people’s footsteps clanging on the metal stairs and walkways.”
In 2011, the university’s Campus Plan saw departments looking to recalibrate teaching spaces, rather than being spread out across Salford. Plans to create the MediaCity campus to house all Arts, Media and Creative Technologies were proposed. The future of the cherished but rundown ‘old’ Adelphi Building – and the much-lauded but awkward Centenary Building, barely 15 years old – suddenly looked less certain.
Ominously, the plan read: “Consolidating on the core site will also release properties and sites that can be disposed to generate income.”
By 2016, Adelphi and Centenary were no longer used for teaching at Salford. However, the university still owns the buildings and some hope there could still be a use for the award-winning Centenary.
Martin Hughes says: “I’d like to see it used again because it would work for some programmes. I think they should use it again and connect the two campuses together.”
Carole O’Reilly thinks Centenary’s illustrious past may complicate plans for the site, which forms one of the largest undeveloped spaces in the proximity of Manchester City Centre, making it highly valued.
She says demolition may not be an option due to the likely outcry of architecture and heritage bodies – to say nothing of how Stephen Hodder might receive the news.
Responding to suggestions in 2018 that the building might become a primary school, Eddy Rhead, co-founder of the Manchester Modernist Society commented: “The Society is obviously optimistic that The Centenary Building can find a useful, new role. Not only were we worried that a quality piece of modern architecture was to be lost, but dismayed that such a young building was to be demolished and the questions that raises about sustainability and wastefulness.”
Between 2019 - 2022 Centenary has been temporarily used as headquarters for Channel 4’s reality TV show ‘The Circle’ and festivals across the city. Flats have sprung up on the old Centenary car-park and the prized area will be under intense scrutiny from the university, council and developers.
But for now, almost 30 years since the construction of the building hailed “dynamic, modern and sophisticated”, trees cover the glass facade of a space forgotten in a quiet corner of the University of Salford campus.
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