When Joseph Rykwert set forth his ideas on "the university as an archetype of our times" in the 1970s, many believed that Great Britain offered the most fertile terrain for them to take root in. Denis Lasdun had just completed the ziggurat clusters of East Anglia University outside Norwich, and James Stirling, with his formidable hat trick of Leicester, Oxford and Cambridge, had struck a blow at the untarnishably conservative heart of neo-gothic British academic architecture.

The provocative challenge of Stirling's History Faculty Library in Cambridge was variously seen as an oblique tribute to the Greco-Roman mannerism of C.R. Cockerell's earlier University Library, a snide reference to the neo-gothic grandeur of Gilbert Scott's twentieth-century version of the same idea, and even as revenge on the reactionary Christ's College faculty members who denied Britain its first crack at mainstream European Modernism in 1936 when they rejected Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry's proposed extension of the student housing.

With university building boom in full swing and the Robbins Report (1963) calling for major expansion in higher education, the nation acquired seven new universities between 1954 and 1974, plus myriad extensions and additions to fill out the empty spaces between streets and quadrangles in the ancient university towns. The building euphoria boosted the cause of modern architecture, with Big Jim's breach in the ramparts of Cambridge conservatism making way for the geometrical contextualisation of Leslie Martin's Harvey Court (Gonville and Caius College), the disymmetrical distortions of Ralph Erskine's Clare Hall, and the neo-picturesque rationalism of Powell and Moya's Cripps Building (St John's College).

Despite rearguard support for anodyne revivals of its medievalist allure, Cambridge has had an authentic tradition of new ever since. The new buildings we report on here are a revealing inventory of eccentric British architectural sensibility in modern times.

In some ways spiritual heir to Stirling's idiosyncratic inventiveness, John Outram has revisited the stately acrobatics of his History Faculty Library in his Judge Institute of Management Studies, a bizarre academic pantheon (some would say a robot temple) to all the gods of his fertile imagination which reinstates at a stroke the claims of the ugly and beautiful against Quinlan Terry's not-so-distant petit-bourgeois Philistinism. Masked by the decorated shed

of the Addenbrooke Hospital, the Judge Institute does full justice to all the commonplaces about enabling people to relate to each other on a "human scale". Outram's temple is a collection of places at once archaic and hypermodern, a suspended agglutination of technology and iconology which relegates Robert Venturi's decorative virtuosity to the status of software simulation.

Michael Hopkins' equally assertive Queen's Building for Emmanuel College seems less than awestruck by the nearby Wren Chapel, that mythical incarnation of architectural Englishness. Hard and uncompromising, with an egg-shaped sandstone carapace studded with concrete squares like the plated back of a Roman testugo, Hopkins' no-nonsense container for teaching rooms and auditorium breaks the geometrical plan of the Old Library and Master's Lodge by driving a wedge through it towards the road.

Edward Cullinan's frankly modern and subtly bizarre St John's College New Library cross-wing added to the nineteenth-century Penrose Building repeats the quadrangle principle of university construction in Cambridge, but also sounds an ambiguous and mildly disturbing note with its contrasts between big plate-glass windows, brick apse, and materials and volumes that soar to a surreal climax in a whimsical aluminium and glass lantern lighting the library staircase.

Habitual high-flier Sir Norman Foster has never had much regard for postmodernist contextual subtlety. Thus, in an already rather densely constructed context, his shiny glass-and-steel Law Faculty fuselage is truncated like an organ pipe where it faces the celebrated History Faculty "cascade", adding a bold counter-melody to Stirling's neo-constructionist solo statement. And yet, when the nearby Institute of Criminology is built, what now seems an assertive isolated gesture will in fact reinstate Cambridge's typical courtyard configuration by creating a well-defined green area between the two blocks.

Finally, with the delicate geometrical playfulness that is their hallmark, Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones have repeated the success of their earlier Darwin Study Centre (see Abitare, September 1994) in their Student Housing for Darwin College. Though less demanding as a brief, the new residence is an effective and interesting essay on housing design in a context where private home and place of study are complementary facets of being a student. Dixon and Jones have given Cambridge a gently ironical end-of-the-century Arcadia a functional tracery of symmetrical masses and regular doorways and fenestration, with a loggia pierced to allow glimpses of a hopefully ever-vernal sky.