On Jacobsen's ideal platform, an absolute architectural morality prevails--there can be no mistakes and no excuses, no afterthoughts and no escape clauses, about the siting of the individual components of the scheme. No room for improvization, no exploiting the happy accident--and no room for growth.' Reyner Banham

In his 1964 review, Reyner Banham may well be forgiven for arguing so forcibly that Arne Jacobsen's St Catherine's College in Oxford was complete. In his critical account for The Architectural Review--in which he somewhat provocatively described St Cat's as 'the best motel in Oxford'--Banham was as clear in his criticism as Jacobsen was in his vision. St Cat's could, he stated, be understood in a single sweep of the eye. It was, he observed, an exercise in elementary composition, the footprint of which was more a logical outworking of architectural proportion than a constraint of the site, which, as a reinterpretation of the closed courtyard, had made a valuable contribution to British collegiate architecture.