It was not until the 1950s that Oxford University allowed modern architecture, writes CHRIS KOENIG

The idea that Oxford somehow stumbles along a few decades behind everywhere else is most evident in its architecture. Read in Nikolaus Pevsner's Buildings of Oxfordshire, for instance, that the first truly 20th century buildings in the city appeared more than half way through it and you find yourself thinking about dons in much the same way as the Mock Turtle in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland thought about his school master: "We called him Tortoise because he taught us. Really you are dull."

He wrote of two small buildings, both by Michael Powers of the Architects Co-Partnership, dated 1957 and 1958: "These, one can hardly believe it, were the first buildings at Oxford in the language of the 20th century. It beats even Cambridge."

The two buildings were an approach to the Master's Lodging at Corpus Christi and a small range at St John's, which Pevsner praised as "an intelligently planned group of polygons without anything mannered".

Very shortly after the commissioning, dons stuck two toes in the water. In 1960, Arne Jacobsen arrived in town from Copenhagen and started building St Catherine's College, the same time that the traditional-style Nuffield College was completed.

Pevsner wrote: "This, a whole college built by one man to one design, makes Nuffield College look even more absurd.

He added that the International Modern of the 1930s never appeared at Oxford at all (until St Cat's). He wrote:"This style of much glass and a minimum of mass which flourished in progressive countries in the thirties is not dead; that St Catherine's shows."

Pioneers in the business of departing from the antique were architects Powell & Moya who brought us in the 1960s Wolfson College and the lovely picture gallery at Christ Church. The reasons why Oxford University suddenly embraced the architectural modern world are enigmatic: a sort of latter-day enlightenment perhaps, waking it up out of its cloistered introspection, or more probably simply force majeur in the shape of ever-increasing student numbers.

Mind you, even in the 19th century, Matthew Arnold had famously written: "Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! . . . . whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age."

But Oxford had been ruminating the great sea change before it happened. The 1951 Epstein statue of Lazarus, who, of course, rose from the dead, looks quite at home in the 16th-century New College chapel, as do the abstract stained-glass windows by John Piper in the chapel of mock-medieval Nuffield.

Pioneers in the world of concrete were Arup Associates. They were responsible for the jutting concrete beams at two separate buildings at Somerville and, in the early 1970s, for our own Newspaper House in Osney Mead, which Pevsner describes as "one of the best commercial buildings".

Matthew Arnold continued: "Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties." I for one cannot help thinking that our time is better than his!