Robert Gordon University – Garthdee campus

The Garthdee campus is the Robert Gordon University's only campus, where all academic departments are located and teaching and research takes place.

Main plaza at Garthdee campus

Gray's School of Art building

It is situated in the south-west of the city, on the banks of the River Dee. For much of its history it was a greenfield site, with parts used as the gardens and estate of the manor of Garthdee House, farmland, and open meadows. The first university buildings were in use from the 1950s, with major additional developments in the 1960s, 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s. The design concept produced in the mid-1990s by architects Norman Foster + Partners was to separate the site into three zones; to the north, by the road, would be car parking; a central zone would contain the main buildings, and the southern boundary by the riverbank would be for parkland and wildlife. Ancient lines of beech trees and woodlands were retained in the concept. It also included a "university street" running east–west and connecting the buildings, which were to be "pavilions in the landscape". These elements of the design concept have been more or less adhered to in subsequent developments by other architects.

Parkland at Garthdee campus

History of site

Lawn at Garthdee campus, with the Round Tower student residences and Central Services administration building visible

The campus incorporates areas that were formerly in separate ownership. The western end of the campus was the estate of a Victorian manor which was owned by a number of private owners until donated to the institution by the architect Tom Scott Sutherland in 1954. The manor is now the Principal's Office.

Garthdee Estate

Garthdee House

The campus stands on an area previously known as Kaim Hill which had been part of the rural Pitfodels Estate, also known as the "Lands of Pitfodels", located from the Bridge of Dee to Cults. It included a castle abandoned in 1622 known as Pitfodels Castle.

Eastern part of campus

Riverside face of the Sir Ian Wood building. Bank of River Dee to right.

The eastern part of the site was not part of Scott Sutherland's Garthdee estate, although it too had historically been part of the Pitfodels estate which had been divided up and sold in the 19th century. It has had a number of uses, and was owned by Aberdeen City Council until the university purchased it in stages beginning in 1996.

When the Robert Gordon University achieved university status in 1992, it had numerous small campuses scattered around the city of Aberdeen, often consisting of one or two buildings each housing a single department; many of these buildings were of low quality. Its largest campus, Schoolhill in Aberdeen city centre, was still shared with Robert Gordon's College. The university's Vice-Principal at the time, Gavin Ross, was an architect who had trained under the American modernist architect Louis Kahn.

The campus today

Plan of Garthdee campus

Atrium of Sir Ian Wood building. Base of green library tower and Learning Café are at right.

The campus extends to 23 hectares (57 acres), although some of this is currently landscaped parkland, undeveloped, or under construction. In addition, the university owns a further 8 hectares (20 acres) of land to the south-west (primarily woodland) and 22 hectares (54 acres) at Waterside Farm on the opposite bank of the River Dee; this former farmland is currently undeveloped. According to the university's masterplan for the campus, the Waterside Farm site is at a low level and lies in a 1:200 year floodplain. In 1937, a newspaper report in the Glasgow Herald described how the three occupants of the farm (the farmer, a housekeeper and a cattleman) became marooned by rising water, which was flooding the site and farmhouse to a depth of 3 feet (0.91 m). A lifeboat was brought by road from Aberdeen Harbour, launched at Banchory-Devenick some way up the River Dee, and sailed down the river to the farm. The lifeboat crew rescued the trio from the rising floodwaters, plus a kitten and the farm dog. Urban explorers have investigated the abandoned farm buildings, and posted photographs showing them to be derelict. The main campus is a significant height above the River Dee and is not susceptible to flooding.

Sir Ian Wood building (formerly Riverside East)

Sir Ian Wood building and plaza, with library tower visible.

Library tower (right) and riverbank path. Faculty of Health and Social Care building also visible.

The Sir Ian Wood building opened in late summer 2013, some months after the University Library it houses. For the first two years, it was known as the Riverside East building, until on 2 July 2015 it was officially opened by Anne, Princess Royal and named in honour of Sir Ian Wood, the oil industry businessman and then-chancellor of the university. Situated at the east end of the Garthdee campus, it is the largest building at the university (34,000 square metres). In mid-2015, a five-storey extension to the east end of the building opened when the building as whole was renamed by the Princess Royal,

Faculty of Health and Social Care building

Faculty of Health and Social Care building

The Faculty of Health and Social Care building was designed by architects Halliday Fraser Munro of Aberdeen, and opened in 2002 at a cost of over £21 million. It provides 13,500 square-metres of accommodation for the Schools of Applied Social Studies, Nursing, Midwifery and Paramedic Practice and Health Sciences. The building also acts as a hub for student services, with the university's student helpdesk, careers service, disability and dyslexia service, accommodation office and counselling service located in facilities off the main atrium. The building comprises seven storeys, six of which are currently in use with the smaller seventh (top) level left unoccupied as an equipment/plant space and in case future expansion is required. Like the Business School building, it takes the form of a stepped-box set partially into the hillside with a curved roof stretching to the ground, with the main entrance on Level 4 and a full-height atrium dominating the centre of the building. Raised "bridges" connecting the two sides of the atrium on each floor serve as staff recreation areas.

RGU:SPORT building

RGU Sport building, seen from south-east

The RGU:SPORT building is a campus sports and fitness centre, designed by architectural firm Thomson Craig & Donald and opened in 2005 at a cost of £10.7 million, including support from organisations such as sportscotland.

International College building

International College (ICRGU) building, behind RGU:SPORT

The International College (ICRGU) building is a modular pre-fabricated two-storey building situated at the rear of RGU:Sport. It was constructed in 2011 to provide additional teaching space for the "International College at RGU" (ICRGU). The temporary building housing ICRGU was constructed in 2011 and has teaching facilities for these 400 students along with the administration and staff offices for the programme; it is not used for mainstream university classes.

Aberdeen Business School building

Business School building

The Aberdeen Business School building was designed by architects Norman Foster and Partners. It opened in 1999, with construction having taken over a year and at a cost of £19.5 million. The building won a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Award for Architecture in 1999.

Round Tower and Square Tower

Round Tower student residences

The only student accommodation on the campus is located in two small-scale towers known as the Round Tower and the Square Tower, close to the Scott Sutherland building. Designed by London-based architects Edward Jones and Jeremy Dixon and completed in 1993, they are inspired by traditional Scottish tower houses. The cost of design and construction was twice as great as for a typical university hall of residence at the time. The towers have received architectural acclaim by critics and are included in Prospect magazine's list of the 100 best Scottish modern buildings and won a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Regional Award in 1994.

Garthdee House

Garthdee House serves as the Principal's Office

Garthdee House is the location of the Principal's Office. It is a Victorian manor house which formed the core of the Garthdee estate, which with later purchases of adjacent land became today's campus. The architect was William Smith, who also designed Balmoral Castle. The building has Jacobean-style detailing, and was constructed in 1872 of granite ashlar blocks typical of Aberdeen architecture of the time. The interior was designed by Daniel Cottier, a pioneer of the Aesthetic movement in interior design, and Garthdee House has a fine interior with a grand hallway lit by a skylight, a grand staircase with a stained-glass window by Cottier depicting the Roman goddess Ceres, arcaded gallery on the upper floor, and ornate cornices and plasterwork with Corinthian columns and pilasters.

At the front of the house, the ground floor with two bay windows housed a grand drawing room and dining room. A manicured lawn stretched to the wooded slope to the riverbank; the Scott Sutherland building now stands on the site of this lawn. The building's first owner was John Moir Clark, who owned a successful canning and curing business, and he gave it the name Garthdee House, which later came to refer to the whole area. Later owners included Alexander Edmond, an advocate (i.e. lawyer) from Aberdeen and by 1907 Alexander Gray, a "home & foreign produce broker & provision & grain merchant" (sic) lived there. The widow of John Webster sold it in 1953 to a company owned by Tom Scott Sutherland (see history of campus above). For two years he lived there with his wife, but they found it too big and he donated it, along with its estate, to the Aberdeen School of Architecture. The couple moved out in 1955. The School was subsequently renamed after Tom Scott Sutherland and extensions were constructed to provide the space needed. The Scott Sutherland School of Architecture was the sole occupant of Garthdee House from that time until 2013, when the Principal's Office became its main occupant. The School of Architecture moved to an extension of the Ian Wood building in Summer 2015.

Garthdee House Annexe (formerly the Scott Sutherland building)

Garthdee House Annexe (formerly the Scott Sutherland building), showing 1957 (right) and 1969 (left) sections

Garthdee House Annexe (formerly the Scott Sutherland building), 1971 section.

The School of Architecture's mid-20th century extensions to Garthdee House became known as the Scott Sutherland Building, and housed the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture and Built Environment and some departments of Gray's School of Art. The School of Architecture moved to the Ian Wood building (see above) in Summer 2015 and the building was renamed Garthdee House Annexe. It still houses departments of the School of Art, as well as general purpose classrooms and lecture theatres.

The building consists of major 20th century extensions to the Victorian villa of Garthdee House, originally designed to provide space for the architecture school. The building's design and construction are typical of the era in which each part was constructed. The first extension was opened in 1957 when the School moved to Garthdee. This 1950s section is typical of modernist educational architecture in 1950s Britain; the exterior is faced with plate-glass with teal opaque sections for walls and large expanses of clear glass for the large windows. It was designed by Tom Scott Sutherland's architectural company at no profit, as part of his donation of the site, with Ian Fraser as principal architect. It featured studios which looked south over the lawn of Garthdee House and down to the riverbank.

By the late 1960s, this lawn had been built on by further extensions, the first phase opening in 1969 and the second phase in 1971, leaving only a small lawn in a quadrangle enclosed on all four sides. The 1960s/early 1970s extensions were designed by local architects Thomson, Taylor, Craig and Donald in a very different style to the 1957 section. Like many British buildings of that era, main external materials for these sections are white concrete and brick, with smaller use of dark ceramic tile, but with dramatic jagged roofline to allow skylights on the south and west wings. These new sections provided new laboratories, lecture theatres, workshops, staff offices and other facilities. These were required following the decision of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1958 that future architectural training should be at degree-level, and to provide new courses in surveying and other areas of the built environment such as building economics.

Central Services Building

Central Services Building.

Immediately adjacent to the Scott Sutherland Building and between it and the riverbank, the Central Services Building is an administrative building housing Human Resources, Finance, Accommodation Services, and various other support departments. It opened in 2008 and was designed by the architectural firm RMJM (which had designed many university campuses, most famously those at the University of Stirling and University of York in the 1960s). The building takes the form of a rectangular timber-clad "tube", with a recessed ground floor. The building contains 2000 square metres of office space, and each floor contains mainly open-plan offices but with some individual offices. The top floor has meeting rooms and a terrace giving views over the Dee valley and surrounding landscape. The recessed ground floor and brise-soleils over the north/south-facing windows on upper floors are designed to minimize solar gain and so reduce over-heating in summer (and thus reduce the need for air-conditioning). The building forms the first part of a plan to replace the Scott Sutherland building and redevelop that site on the campus, of which the Central Services Building forms the southern boundary. Prior to the building's construction, a car park had been located on the site.

Gray's School of Art building

Gray's School of Art

Quadrangle at Gray's: 1990s temporary extension at top of photograph.

The Gray's School of Art building opened in 1966 to allow the art school to expand from the former building next to the Aberdeen Art Gallery in the city centre which was later university's Administration Building. The Gray's School of Art building has been acclaimed by architectural critics and is one of the 60 DoCoMoMo Key Scottish Monuments.

Other buildings

Other modern buildings on campus (and older buildings that had once been part of the estate) provide for administration, healthcare, student support, a campus nursery for the children of staff and students, printing and design service and religious facilities. The campus includes extensive parkland, trees and meadows.

Student Union offices, where the University Street passes through the RGU:Sport building.

River Dee, as seen from path to riverbank.

RGU:SPORT building, where the University Street enters.

Business School building at evening