embracing the modern

This evening's review took me to the magnificent back quads of St John's college, where the students live in hives and cubestacks of concrete and glass, interspersed with multilevel planting boxes. There are a lot of steps, a lot of walls, a lot of sun. And here, on the way into the Auditorium courtyard, I found the deep shade bed containing three handsome tree ferns in the wall where the modern space meets the old. That transitional retaining wall of smooth-dressed Oxford Gold hints at the possibility of modernity; the three specimen Tree Ferns are the 21st Century dropped into old Oxford.