Proctor and Matthews: 20 Years

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Design Method

Working alongside Proctor and Matthews for two decades has given me a special respect for their method. The longevity is partly due to proximity. Our respective careers have made their way in central London working on similar varieties of social projects; housing, schools, arts and leisure buildings.

But there is a deeper affinity. I have followed it un-selfconsciously over the years and am now offered the opportunity to study it. There is a belief system about what buildings should be like, how their use and expression combine together. Part of this is an attitude to the purpose of construction itself. Their approach has been forged by continual questioning, confrontations with the perennial architectural questions. What is a facade for? What can it contribute to townscape? What value has the marks of assembly? These architects have avoided the sidestepping of so many other moderns; if a problem appears intractable then sidle up to it through a different discourse; sociology, literary theory, historicism.

They are architects pure and simple. The ‘simplicity’ that Mies referred to. They confront the problem of building by making form.

In what follows a pre-disposition to set up this partnership’s work as dialectically opposed to other trends or as a drawing together and continuation of earlier threads is resisted.

(Certainly they are not immune to their surroundings, why would one site oneself in London then ignore its architectural milieu. The weakness of the contemporary critical base they seem to overcome by jumping back to the work of the 1980s critics).1 My approach will be to take the use of construction in these designs to be a well-thought out generating system and a structure, in the sense of open-work system, into which can be fitted a variety of meanings.

To start with elementary things. In the work separate components defined by specific functions are studied, understood then brought together. Materials are treated in their essences and joined painstakingly. The interactions within each chosen pallet of materials are used to reinforce their physicality. Across the projects the manipulation of elements is made by the establishment and subsequent development of a series of tropes. Elements recurring tend to be those that handle best when subjected to these treatments and which then display this parsing.

Is this more than just a sifting and recombination of architectural patterns combined with a respect for materials?

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of construction that has occurred. They will comfortably leave traditional materials to get on in their time honoured way placed right next to seemingly unique assemblages of built form; consequences rigorously thought out.

Different methodologies rarely co-exist for long. In their treatments of reinforced concrete construction Auguste Perret went one way and Le Corbusier another. The latter’s treatment of flat-slab neutral space and skinned facades has dominated subsequent development. Perret’s framing, fields and revetments, are neoclassical in origin, if that naming includes the speculations of Auguste Choisy who found the wooden architecture of the primitive hut in everything that followed. Proctor and Matthews work is not neoclassical but takes a cue from the way buildings have been made in the past. Each project refers not only to its own making but to other constructions as well. This is not the opposition of the built object to ‘all the constructions it might otherwise have been’. It is more about a rifling through of previous methods for what might best be bent to solving the conditions at hand. Every excursion is controlled by the trajectory of previous findings.

These architects are a generation too late to acquire directly any of the pragmatism instilled by war and subsequent austerity. They also avoided the contamination of working in either of the off-shoots of Team 4 so their technical uptake has been very different from a large proportion of their contemporaries. To me they read very much as an alternative to that establishment. The spectacular success of the HSBC headquarters, Hong Kong and Lloyds, London with their technology transfers from transport and military hardware, extreme specifications of glass, artificial rubber, metal alloys and high strength concretes combined in dry assembled, mannered joints have tended to swamp other discourses. Proctor and Matthews have steadily worked away in a parallel universe.

Distinct among current genres I would summarise their work as a craft-based approach forced through the filters of relatively recently developed forms of prescriptive specifications, and of modern building science. Everything is re-studied for its potential but worked within the context of its back-story, where it came from to be as it is. This makes for practical procurement.

They do use materials in seemingly new ways and their use of technology may therefore be deemed ‘high’; (they have been styled ‘inventors’), but this drive is unrelated to the general dislocation between design and pure performance

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Opposite top Hall House, panels of flint in galvanised steel trays Opposite bottom Le Corbusier, Ozenfant Studio, 1922 Above Auguste and Gustave Perret, Church of Notre Dame du Raincy, 1921–1922

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Opposite top left and bottom Island Gardens Housing Office, ‘weightless’ roof Opposite top Abode, ‘folded’ ridge and thatch roof Right Poplar Play Nursery, component model

It is easiest to interpret this as the development of a series of set-pieces sharing common forms though the objectives on each occasion may be very different.

Architectural/Structural Elements

The following list of architectural devices was compiled by scanning through arrays of thumbnail photographs of projects we have worked on or visited. By making comparisons sets jump out at one. This ordering process is not at all comprehensive, and the names given to classes are rather arbitrary so as not to belie the complexity they have. There will be other useful groupings crossing the divisions made here.

The elements chosen share three characteristics: They originate in structure.

Each listing encloses common forms, hierarchies of elements, adjacencies.

They look as though they could have been made in the same way.

Canopies

The roof as ‘type’ speaks of the origin of building. The projects featured in this book are very much of-this-earth and placed in relation to the ground plane. The all-encompassing roof made its earliest appearance in the first design for the Poplar ‘Pier’ leisure centre and was to be later explored further in the Coram Foundation competition submission and the Oak Tree centre in west London. At Poplar the roof plane containing the ‘pepper pot’ of sky lights and tree apertures is bounded and is not an infinitely extendable surface, but a cropped plate, the edges contributing to the stiffness of the beam grillage beneath rather than being sustained by it. Supporting columns function in the same way as trees in the grove, cantilevering up from the ground and shaped accordingly. The absence of bending moment at their tops allows the insertion of a visual separation, a capital detail.

The weightless but geometrically controlled roof then resurfaced at the Island Gardens Housing office. The elliptical spitfire wing profile is given a pronounced belly and was originally intended to be left as gloss sealed timber.

Simple devices are employed to make the roof ‘float’.

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Its form is complete and closed and it stands on slender pins above a clean-cornered frame. Inside a small table matches the canopies form; the architects of Proctor and Matthews’ generation who were influenced by Mies van der Rohe’s attitude to construction detail hit on metonymy and played it to the hilt. Large structures mimic small, the detail embodies the whole. Circular windows are the set-piece penetration in the smooth cast walls, projected to deal with the curving plane. Big deep pitched roofs, particularly for gathering places give height and volume and genuinely save structural weight until extremely steep. Halls embrace gatherings. The social function could not be more obvious.

Colonnades

If the plans are set up as overlaid patterns then their internal consistency has to be maintained at the same time as they are being coupled together. Arcades enclosed and extending are one way. The courtyard is a hermetic world, columns are short and close spaced to carry low sheltering roofs. Loggias are set high and wide to make peristyles.

Poplar Play Nursery and the Poplar Pier Centre were developed together as a town-planning structure. They share common details. The playschool was first. Folding doors are everywhere, big wide-hinged, defining boxes then releasing them. They appear as facade shutters. As these planes are folded back the main building frames are revealed as column lines, aisles and edges. At right angles to the main ranges of building simple colonnades are set up immediately defining a bounded space. The remaining two edges are lightly drawn in with landscape features. Different column rows are distinguished in their shaft treatments to lead the eye on and to establish the legibility of circulation. The common structural materials have a wide range of elasticity’s which yield different diameters for a given storey height and this property is manipulated to highlight the patterns of structure.

All the time that there is a building up of technique away from the primitive hut there is a reaching back down. At Abode, Newhall thatch is used close cropped and precise, the ridge completed with the severest line of folded lead sheet. The Zoo buildings are like children’s camps assembled from found objects. The lion house at Whipsnade shows how such direct manipulation of materials changes down an architectural gear towards the making of an animal house of intense simplicity.

There is a brand of contemporary architects who think it synthetic to use developed forms inflected in new ways. The responsibility for ensuring these appropriations don’t leak is pressed back on the subcontractor; skylights used as windows, space blanket insulation to make building envelopes. This product abuse is a subversion of the postwar pragmatism when high value materials were combined to meet quotidian requirements. Those applications were made by people well-versed in using standardised, packaged, deliverable products. Proctor and Matthews unpick the knot and do not seek re-centring effects. They work closely with sub-contractors, respecting the depth of their knowledge.

Aedicules

The schemes are peppered with aedicules , enclosures of space, of all scales, for example oriel windows, cabinets and sleeping closets, whole houses within ‘Spreken arches’.

Everything is treated like large pieces of furniture. How many times does one see an architect correct a misconceived space by emphasising the staircase, an element to galvanise a leaden space. But if the stair is just a fixed piece of furniture from the first, neither forming the centre-point of the circulation composition nor a dynamic diagonal but simply

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Opposite top and bottom Island Gardens Housing Office, study model with circular windows, curving plane and elliptical ‘Spitfire’ wing Right Island Gardens Housing Office, entrance interior, with small table matching canopy form

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boxed in square and stabilising the flows of movement around the room then other potentials present themselves.

The device of separating the upper treads from the lower by the omission of a single riser, as seen in the slo homes at Newhall, expresses the family withdrawing from the communal reducing the bridge structure of a domestic staircase to a floor box and suspended companion-way.

concentration of animation. The little house within the big.

But the adoption of forms suited to volumetric production before any move to prefabrication points beyond technical determinism.

There is a tradition that building construction perpetuates a distinction between Eupalinos, constructor in stone and Tridon, the builder of ships in wood.3 Both however share a common method, for some reason identified as characteristically modern, originating in the rationalised manufacturing of Marc Brunel.4 Tasks are sub-divided and sub-assemblies and blanks brought up gradually. This is the craft tradition drawn upon in these designs, that of the specialist making his manageable section of work then bringing the distillation of expertise to be slotted into the whole.

This approach works well in refurbishments of existing buildings. Precise boxes, independently expressed, fetch up against particular points of existing armatures. The new installations appear fully reversible. The transition from rough to smooth, low tolerance to arrised, is negotiated across narrow spaces. Shadows infiltrate themselves and expand the spaces slipping away into the gaps.

In the new-build projects secondary elements are always treated as frames and formalisations. Front doors are for greetings. That pause is controlled with the provision of a pavilion, real or implied, mediating between indoors and out.

At Ropemakers Field external spaces are defined matching internal ones in size. The play of perception is precisely channelled in these adjustments and reinforcements of scale.

B r a c e d b ox k i t e s

If these sub-assemblies are treated as coherent items then scales become elastic, small houses are made bigger by their envelopment of the kind of spaces Gaston Bachelard calls ‘shells’.2 Their margins become points of intense architectonic activity. Seals have to be made, fixings are expressed or suppressed. The relative movements of the parts are catered for. Occasionally the aedicules break their bounds to resolve competing demands in a composition. At Abode, Newhall the big dormer windows simultaneously separating out the terrace units and tying together the roof and walls.

These elements are a real joy to the engineer. In the absence of elemental timber framing, a common feature of many of Proctor and Matthews’ projects but un-available in mass housing projects, the builders’ predisposition to making in wood, (‘Tridon’ as above), is satisfied by the refinement of trussed crates of space. These armatures might mount a screen, (Adobe), or a canopy, (John Eccles House), sometimes just a loggia (Hotel, Cambridge). At Ropemakers Field the primitive hut outside is implied by the barest assembly of sticks with a fully embedded wood embrasure set behind it.

The containments that pre-fabrication brings are made into compositional devices. Even the finest car design concentrates itself around the points of contact, visual and tactile, the wheel hubs, the dashboard. There is a

A u g u s t P e r r e t ’s f r a m i n g a n d f i e l d d ev i c e s

This is taking up Perret against Corbusier. One seldom sees the picture frame treated as a structural type like the arch or

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Opposite Bucknall House, ‘precise’ window box in existing aperture Right Ropemakers Field, ‘frames and formalisations’, analytical axonometric

beam but it is an efficient and a flexible construction motif, load from above being directed into edge posts then distributed back into the elastic medium below. It provides the capping to the end-grains of a field of larch board. It is the tray for an egg box of flint cobbles. Like pictures in a gallery the sparse frames of Proctor and Matthews’ work enclose and separate off spaces of intense activity, finely detailed joinery or enriched material.

According to engineering statics the best places to pick up a frame are the four quarter points part way down the sides.

This induces an efficient pattern of bending and leaves the corners free to read visually. Formal frame elements are used in counterpoint to main frames. The Hall house, Burnham Overy Staithe, has panels set within sub-frames in turn set upon principle frames. The lightness of the non-structural component draws attention to the functional dimensions of the primary elements.

Columns and their Capitals

The juncture of horizontal and vertical is a place where architecture must address construction. I once saw the architect Peter Foggo react badly to the critic Charles Jencks’ slide of the five orders of architecture set alongside a Miesian cruciform column and thereby positing an evolution of ideas. There is no development. It is the anamnesis of the recurring present, the same problem re-presenting itself over and over again, making the opportunity to carry different contents. In Proctor and Matthews’ work the column is continually reworked. The Gorilla house posts confront the same problems as those of the Doric column. Horizontal bending in the entablature must be converted into vertical compression of the shaft. A bundling of sticks becomes the fluting of the cylinder in light, and the point of highest strain, the echinus, is a spreader radiating the kinaesthetic of strain.

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surrounded by a sequence of commentaries, marginalia added by hand over generations, and the original wordings get expunged by the side of subsequent scribe’s hands. The residue is a conceptual space of great subtlety.

Opposite left Abode, entrance threshold and screen Opposite right Hotel, Cambridge, loggia Right Chronos Buildings, entrance canopy frame

Proctor and Matthews most often choose base and head details that are recessed, dealing with the disparity in those frames where the column, not to buckle, is of greater breadth than the head beams. The plates or billet separating the elements are made long enough to allow a measured rotation.

The Chronos Buildings on the Mile End Road, have a very fine capital detail; the cushion moulding is an uncapped hollow section, as is the base. The shadowed recesses in both junctions pick out the components they connect.

Columns particularly register the movement of daylight an effect enhanced when the shaft is taken up past the ceiling seeming to support only a skylit area. Similarly the base to the ‘flitched’ timber column at the Hall House is a fabricated cruciform of galvanised steel plate.

Drawings

There is a wide range of drawing techniques and projections deployed in the generation of these designs. Flexibility of drawing style obviously broadens the compass of what is achievable. This seems an important part of the spread that the work embodies.

Sketches tend to be built up. I have heard this called paratactic ordering.5 A design is built up rather in the way Jewish Mosaic Law is assembled. The original text is

In our experience the most common way an architect will develop a design is by using ‘a flock of sheep’. In the film The Belly of an Architect the central character diagnoses himself with the broad sweep of a felt tip, large graphic arrows analyse feelings experience and context. In such ways design steadily condenses, some magic point where the protean lines mesh then lie still. Alternatively there is an inexorable march from master concept to particular condition. A cartoon illustrates the flash of inspiration. A heart designates the heart of a design. But what of another way, the piling up of mutually antagonisms and difficulties, until a rich peat of potential can be excavated and re-ignited? Individual sketches build up into a sketchbook tracking back and forth. Contributions from different sources are collected together, but without overt ordering. This is how Proctor and Matthews work. The sketches use that Renaissance trick, perhaps taken from the dissecting table, parts are disembodied and studied. The page is rotated to separate the parts. Into the centre the design appears. Like Carlo Scarpa and his ‘cartoni’ the design trajectory can be tracked in the build up on the page.

Only at the very last is there a cascade of design information fixed and co-ordinated for building to commence. If modern procurement processes would allow it one could imagine these architects following the open-ended design methods of Jorn Utzon or Hugo Häring.

Given the ‘worked over’ nature of the sketch material by comparison there seems a scarcity of study models.

Competitors working the same ground use large-scale models, pulling apart and reconfiguring in rapid bursts, adding and subtracting and photographing. At Proctor and Matthews the models look relatively finished when they eventually appear. The full-scale joint prototypes beloved of the big firms aren’t there either. The time needed to make such physical studies seems to be too much of a jump-cut in the flow of a design process. Perhaps in certain circumstances actual making only serves to constrain. Model-making is suggestive and illustrates problems but may also limit responses which run far freer across the papers surface.

Isometric projections from below recur in the design studies.

Their deployment is much closer to early examples of such drawings rather than James Stirling’s more recent celebrated examples. It is as if the architects at Proctor and Matthews have taken Kenneth Frampton’s critique on the limitations of Auguste Choisy’s analytical drawings to heart.

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Left Poplar Play Nursery, exploded worms-eye axonometric assembly drawing Right Auguste Choisy, analytical drawing

..Choisy presented tectonic tropes as complete entities wherein the space form was inseparable from the mode of construction and where subcomponents were presented as set pieces derived from the influences of climate, material, and cross-cultural interaction.6

This is all well and good but where the critic places such representations as a cul-de-sac in which solid construction is depicted as homogeneous mass anticipating in-situ concrete Proctor and Matthews literally explode that limitation, first by accurately depicting each part then by separating them into assembly drawings.

Conventionalised elevations are used in their classical form to study the modelling of shadows with planes juxtaposed to give depth to a building’s boundary. These drawings shade into more abstract studies. Tonal exercises activate the

optical illusions of depth caused by clashing colours. The hotel in Cambridge has an elevation made out of recessive blue planes. In the Baron’s Place volumetric housing scheme the emphasis is cleverly switched from the stacking of volumes to a camouflage of surface. The type of drawing is made as a pattern of co-planar tones.

And of course and most important to this essay is the detail studies, the 1:5 and full size ‘working details’, the crisp definition of additive elements, functional layers, connection points and drain paths. This work is relentlessly pursued. It is almost Piranesian in the close study of the action of building reflected in its tools. The actual equipment is not drawn,(or I haven’t seen it), but the actuality of the fixings, screws and glues, is all depicted. The appearance of the junctions, the degree to which assembly is revealed is precisely controlled.

It errs on the side of demonstration but occasionally can conceal also.

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Baron’s Place, key worker volumetric housing, surface camouflage

So these are some of the recurrent themes and combinations and the places where they occur in the built work. What of process? A collaboration between architect and engineers, structural, environmental and financial, obviously involves exchange.

Early sketches allude to effects. A proposal gradually appears. Structural rigour is suspended, reined in, released again and so on cyclically. In Proctor and Matthews work the final definition is very precise; in fact amongst the most detailed prescriptions of building I have ever encountered.

The way every bit goes together is considered with an intensity that is maintained throughout the work. Urban scales and window openers get the same care.

N ewh a l l N e i g h b o u r h o o d C e n t r e, H a r l ow

At the time of writing we are mid-project with Proctor and Matthews. A range of farm buildings at Newhall, Harlow is being developed as a neighbourhood centre for surrounding housing developments. This planning gain is to a tight budget. The existing buildings have a long history and have been careful assembled through a sequence of accretion over generations. Each part is leanly built yet well-made representing a significant expenditure from the surplus of a farming community.

A large timber barn, cross-framed in oak timbers thought to be taken from ships de-commissioned from the British navy, forms the eastern stop of the composition. The profile indicates a steep thatched roof that has been recovered with asbestos cement corrugations. A four-square brick storeroom of two storeys with tiled roof is set on the other

end of the building range with low, narrow outbuildings in between. A beautiful tractor canopy framed in scantlings completes the working set.

The circulation pattern of the working farm was around the outside of this arrangement with links across to remote buildings. As structural engineers we were brought to the project only after the first major moves had already been made. The utilitarian buildings are to become the communal hub of the neighbourhood. The big barn becomes a meeting house and auditorium for moots and recitals. The brick barn is refurbished for a high-end restaurant franchise. A third building is proposed, placed midway so that the existing infill is swept away but its outline retained to form two courtyards, internalised but permeable. The colonnades revert to loose ranks of flags, the enclosure is a cloister. The three buildings are allowed an easy relationship. This is the gathering place of a community.

The processes of addition and pragmatic use of materials to hand which suffuse the existing fabric have been taken up in all that has followed. First the barn has been closely examined; to understand its original actions and current imperfections. There are inherent design faults in its bracing system and disposition of elements. The envelope of the building needed replacement, it is dilapidated and impossible to upgrade to any proximation of current standards. At first it looked as if the frame would have to be dismantled and rebuilt, an honest enough action given the original intention of de-mountability. That proved unnecessary. Some additional lateral stiffening might be needed, clearly defined cross-walls with discrete fixing points back to the existing members. An analysis and

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sensitivity check, (the effect on possible outcomes of the uncertainty of design parameters), showed that the existing joints could be strengthened enough for the frame to function as it always has, a pseudo-structure taking some stiffness from its envelope of boards.

Once established these patterns of design behaviour were turned upon the remainder of the buildings, new constructions and existing improvements. The central building, scaled to mediate between the two ends is heavily modelled with openings and is therefore framed. Walls that are not allowed to reach ground level become stiff plates spanning between gables. This and a whole series of engineering set pieces appear alongside the architectural devices. Typical are the three pinned frame and lean-to. The columns are to be light and therefore free of bending. Their top is restrained by a slender member spanning onto a more solid core. The roof covering is minimal or absent.

The form of the central building at Newhall distorts in response to the spaces created between the two ends. The structuring of the roof is treated as a closed problem. The

influence of the boundary conditions is initially ignored in its development then subsequently allowed to modify its edges.

Points on a continuum of structural potential were chosen as study options. Full-length purlins and an eaves beam were examined. These emphasize the substance of the side walls.

The whole building was considered as a set of folded plates, nothing beyond the form of enclosure, just surfaces bending and developing membrane stresses. A crude steel frame with dimensions arranged to suit a simple infilling of timber studs and rafters was drawn up. A scheme for an array of close-framed timber portals, a hull of members dispersing forces like a balloon frame, worked somewhere in between.

Each of these arrangements brought different conditions to their margins. Much time was spent on the western elevation where the external wall of the building is patterned into the adjacent cloister. Pre-cast concrete uprights, capable of taking imprints would either have to take the lateral forces produced by spreading arches or be relieved of significant load which is instead carried to into more substantial corner posts. This continual manipulation of the relative stiffness of

structural elements permeates our work. The architectural balance of components, their close proportioning, is adjusted by means of this structural manipulation.

Farm buildings, despite their seeming perfectibility, have received some attention from architecture’s modern movement.

The famous example of Häring’s Gut Garkau farm illustrates their use as sites on which to demonstrate attitudes to functionalism. The particular way they are made has also been appropriated on occasion. Utzon’s Bägsvaerd Church is a prime example. That building is a social foundation in a farming community. The choices of material and detailing are not intended to fit the building into its context but to demonstrate an attitude to existence. At Newhall there is a novel form of urbanised English countryside way of life being forged out.

What seems to be resulting is a kind of veneering. The picturesque is avoided by selecting materials with some reference to historical modes of covering. These are then used with fully modern details to occupy the spaces left by the original construction.

On the old barn the roof covering is spaced off its frame to mediate the crookedness of the old timbers with the planar surfaces of walls and soffits. This separation deals with the thin-ness of the new high performance insulations relative to old barriers of wattle and thatch. Junctions become discrete locations where loads can be fed into the strong points of the frame. Shadows modelling the space appear in the spaces between. The purer architectural features are not ignored. The steep pitched roof is opened out to its full volume.

Resin rods, drilled in and concealed beneath pellets were considered to return the main joints to adequate strength. In function they matched the ash dowels of the original carpentry, oven dried to an expanding fit. Instead we agreed to use surface mounted strengthening plates. These are contingent, clearly differentiated, scaled distinctively from the surrounding joints but having an immediacy of the latest, simplest means. The joints are not celebrated, nor hidden they just are. Quality levels and convenience are not concealed.

The treatment of the ancillary accommodation is perhaps the

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Opposite Newhall Neighbourhood Centre, 'three building' hub Top Neighbourhood Centre, Phase 1 Bottom Neighbourhood Centre, Colonade of ‘loose rank of flags’

most intriguing part of the scheme. The low range of service spaces on the south side, toilets and stores, are handled in a straightforward way, load-bearing masonry cells with flat timber roofs. Except for precise proportioning the buildings seem unencumbered by design intentions.

On the north side the colonnade forming the main entrance loggia breaks into a top-lit foyer space as it turns onto the end of the main hall. The monitor light is simply framed in reinforced concrete, an incongruous big glass-ended wedge returned to familiarity by construction techniques suited to the resources of local contractors. New elements seem more articulated than existing additions, huddled hard against one another.

The embodied energy of the conversions and small-part new work appears good. The scheme may well be built in stages and the articulated ordinance and interleaving of otherwise independent structural systems allows for this. The complex of buildings can be gradually dismantled or re-configured in the future. There is a real opportunity here for an application of ‘terotechnology’. These buildings are being conceived of as a resource to be husbanded and managed, to support the community and to be cared for in return, not neglected but adjusted to real fitness for purpose at all times. As the design decisions have presented themselves a virtual maintenance manual has been used to evaluate the buildings after ten, 20 or 30 years of their lifespan, when they are in the middle period of their use and should be at their best.

The current scheme draws a wide variety of materials and treatments together, at least five different structural systems and any number of architectural devices. For

coherence it relies on a consistency of method in construction and in design. The way the building will be built has been with the designers at all times. The architectural outcome is governed by their understanding and overt demonstration of the way they have chosen to build. ‘Truth through making’ is the continuity.

This note has set out to show that here again is a building construction whose parts, those running through structure and tectonics, act as pure form carrying a variety of contents, chosen by the architect. The proof of this is in the evident switching that is attendant on the perception of these varied yet all-of-a-piece projects.

Footnotes: 1, This is something different from just sticking to what they know, that window of education that fixes us all.

True they are not currently deeply immersed in academia (although were teaching continually from 1988 to 2000 and have continual involvement as external critics and examiners to schools of architecture and abroad) but they are too well read not to be making their choices from contemporary criticism.

2, Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space.

3, The French poet Paul Valery contrasts the architect Eupalinos of Megara with the naval architect Tridon of Sidon, both from archaid Greece.

4, Brunel, Marc, The father of Isambard and the originator of batch production.

5, Alter, Robert, The Art of Biblical Narrative.

6, Frampton, Kenneth, Studies in Tectonic Culture, p. 59.

References Frampton, Kenneth, Studies in Tectonic Culture, 1995.

Leatherbarrow, David and Mostafavi, Mohsen, Surface Architecture, 2002.

Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, 1976.

Picture Credits: P260 (left) © Peter Bennett Photograpy P262 (top right), P268 (all) © Tim Crocker www.timcrocker.co.uk P266 ©Nicholas Kane P260 (right) © Michel Paoli/ FLC P262 (top left) © Morley Von Sternberg P261 © Mary Ann Sullivan P258, P262 (bottom), P265, P269 © Charlotte Wood

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