Oxford Brookes University will renew its fight for a new £150m Headington campus in earnest this weekend.

New plans go on public display tomorrow, with the university hoping a planning application could be submitted before Christmas.

The university says it has substantially redrawn its plans to meet objections from local residents and councillors about the height and mass of buildings in the scheme, which was rejected by Oxford City Council in September.

Readers of The Oxford Times are today given a first view of the redesigned student centre, as it would look from Headington Road.

The image shows that the western section of the landmark library building (on the right of the picture) has now been reduced from five to four storeys, cutting its height by three metres.

The western face of the building has also been remodelled, with reading rooms projecting into the public square to make the building appear less flat and bulky, one of the criticisms levelled at earlier designs. Glass cladding has been removed on the western side to address residents’ fears about being overlooked.

But Paul Large, Oxford Brookes University’s acting registrar, made it clear that much would depend on the public response to the redrawn scheme, which would add £1m to the cost of transforming the campus.

He said Brookes would be assessing local opinion before deciding whether to proceed with a planning application. If the university felt the new scheme would face the same level of local opposition as the earlier plan, Brookes would consider simply going to a planning appeal with its original scheme.

As well as being less costly, the original scheme would avoid sacrificing library and teaching space.

But Mr Large said he remained hopeful that a costly planning appeal could still be avoided, with Brookes anxious to get its plans for a new campus quickly back on track, in the hope it could still be completed by September 2013.

Mr Large said: “The idea of us throwing the whole thing away and starting again is really something that we could not agree to. We still have to deliver something close to the original vision.

“If it proved too difficult to progress this scheme, the view might be taken that we might as well go to appeal on our first application.”

But Brookes’s hopes of winning local backing received an early blow at a meeting with residents of Headington Hill, who led an effective campaign against the redevelopment of the Gipsy Lane campus.

After being given a presentation on the reworked plans, Susan Lake, chairman of the Headington Hill Residents’ Association, said: “Rather than tinkering around the edges of the basically unaltered plans at this ‘second chance’ for Brookes, the university should drastically lower the height of the building and reconsider the siting.”

The library building originally proposed, but not submitted to the city council, would have been six storeys. But in June Brookes decided to add £5m to the cost of the scheme by proposing a basement library, so the exterior height of the building could be reduced.

The exhibition will be open to the public in the Buckley Building, on the Gipsy Lane campus, tomorrow and Saturday from noon to 4pm.