This afternoon conference on Friday 31st July looked at how architects designed new university buildings and campuses to meet the growing aspirations of a booming generation of tertiary education students and educationalists in Britain in the 1960s.

Focus was on both the local and the national, on Leeds and elsewhere, looking at how particular universities and colleges acquired these bold, modernist schemes, how they were intended to function, what formal aesthetic concerns underpinned them and what broader cultural meanings they held then and might continue to hold today.

The event was staged to coincide with the exhibition 'The New Monumentality' in which three contemporary artists made works that responded to the architecture of the modern post-war period.