MMU's Hollings Campus - The Toast Rack - Wilmslow Road, Manchester, UK

Architect
 L. C. Howitt
Date Built
 1959
Location
 Wilmslow Road & Old Hall Road
Description
If you drive out of the city centre along Oxford Street it becomes Oxford Road and then Wilmslow Road.  As Wilmslow Road passes through Rusholme you pass Platt Fields Park on your right, at that point, across the street from the park, you will see a building that Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described as, "a piece of pop architecture if I ever saw one".

The building in question is part of the Manchester Metropolitan University's Hollings Campus but when it was built in 1959 it was the new home of the Hollings Domestic and Trades College, which had been teaching cookery and domestic science in various incarnations since 1901.

The buildings were designed by City Architect L. C. Howitt who clearly had a sense of humour because in designing two buildings for a domestic science college he made one look like a toast rack and the other a fried egg. 

Pevsner says of the building that it exhibits "a large number of very closely set steep angled concrete piers looping over at the top as parabolic arches.  The floors, owing to this, decrease in depth from bottom to top ...  The staircase windows slant like the arches."