 I think we're going to start. It's a big honor for me to introduce Tony Fretton, who opened his office in 1982. And I think has always worked in a very careful and sensitive way. And I first encountered his work in a building in London called the Lyssen Gallery, which was the first kind of important building of his career that was finished in, I think, 1992, but designed earlier. And it has since then worked both in the UK, but also a lot in Europe. That is to say in Belgium, in the Netherlands, and in Denmark, and also in Warsaw, in fact, because one of the larger buildings of his practice is the British Embassy in Warsaw, which I think was won in competition, but I'm not sure about that. And there is a kind of particular moment in his life, I think, which is at the beginning of the 21st century because he is invited to become a professor in the TU in Delft in 1999. And then the focus of his interest shifts much more towards the Netherlands and to Denmark and to Belgium. And I think what he has achieved is extremely sensitive and rich and pertinent to this present moment with regard to trying to determine an approach to architecture which is both socially responsible and plays close attention to tradition and to a reinterpretation of tradition. So with out any more ado, I will give the mic to Tony Friend. Welcome to the Wood Auditorium, which isn't made of wood, my consternation. And let me see if I can work the technology, which I never do. The best thing is for me to just describe the projects. And then you'll see I have the relationship between form-making and elements of architectural knowledge. So we begin with the Art Museum in Denmark in a place called Fulsang, which means bird song in Danish. And it's a building for a permanent collection that they had of paintings from the 1770s to 1970 in all of the European styles. So it wasn't an astounding collection, but it was very meaningful for the local people because some of the work in the collection depicts this area, which is a place of exceptional beauty. And it's a long way from anywhere. It's two and a half hours south of Copenhagen. And you go across flat landscapes and then like this endlessly. And then arrive in the space between those two buildings you see ahead of you. And in fact, if you're in a farm yard, it's a farm yard, a working farm. So you can see on one side on your left there's an agricultural barn on the right is a land steward's house. And then across from them is a manor house, which is a country classic hall. And it has a tradition of art events that composer Carl Nielsen had a residency there. So it's a curious thing, really. I mean, it has this long history of culture and yet it's very remote. And the building that we made was part of an enterprise by the Danish government in combination with a charity called Real Dania to capitalize on the fact that in that region there were holidaymakers, people who had holiday homes, both from Germany and from Denmark. And yet the area itself was in recession. It was originally a sugar-making place. So it was a clever move, really, to give some kind of focus, which would give pride to the local people and bring other people forward who were in the area. And so that manor house is very captivating. It's not really a good classic hall. It's a country classic hall. And each of the ceilings in each room is slightly different. All of the floors are slightly different. And there's a charm to it. And that charm was something that I wanted to have in the building that we designed, albeit making a building which is rather more abstract than this. So when we got the composition brief, the brief itself suggested very strongly that the new building be placed here to enclose the courtyard in replacement of a building that had burned down. But we made another decision. We decided that that view of the land was so good, so beautiful, as I'll show, that we put the building in a different place. We put the building in a line with the, excuse me, in a line with this building here. And what that did is opened up the view to the countryside. So as you arrive on that route that I described, the first thing you see is this very, very flat landscape, agricultural landscape, which goes out to the sea through a nature reserve. And that's all artificial. It's been created by decades, well, centuries of anonymous work, agricultural work. And so that's the first thing that we wanted you to see. And then it meant the building was to one side. And it's a landscape that changes in the seasons. So here it is in the snow. And when you approach the building, this part steps out. And so you're given the view, and then it's taken away. And then inside the building you find a cafe. And then at the back of that cafe is a room for teaching of art and public events. And the back of that room is a view of an orchard. So the view is given and taken away, and then given back in a different form. And that's become a motif. And it was an unconscious motif in the building, but it's what situates it in the territory. And I should say that one thing that's very important to me, which I hope you're seeing all of the projects, is that what I aim to do through the buildings that I make is to understand qualities, civic qualities or collective qualities in the surrounding landscape and make them visible in the buildings that I do. So when you've left the cafe and you enter the array of galleries, you are in the central gallery, which has a view of the land that you first saw when you come in, and then you turn and go into what's a temporary gallery. You can see the entrance on the left, and then that gallery has a gridded ceiling, and above it are roofed lines, which can be altered from full daylight to dark. So one end, as you can see here, you can have a dark end and then you can have a light end. So it's very flexible and very open to interpretation. And at the other end of that range are a different set of galleries with different daylights for a specific part of the collection. And it was very clear that the collection would be disposed in a particular way and we could design for it. Now that said, a lot of these walls are capable of being moved, not all of them, because when we started, we originally planned a columnar structure so that it could be completely altered in the future, which is what you find museums are. But the Danish construction is precast, precast walls. So we were able to make a series of discrete spaces within them there are movable walls. And then further along, coming back off that corridor, there's another type of rooms, much smaller, six meters square, arranged on filiates. And therefore, these smaller scale paintings, these are paintings from the Danish golden age. And they have a golden ceiling and a decorated ceiling. And the figure that you can see here is one of the light shafts of which there are three on the main facade. And it brings light into the floor of the space while not lighting the walls. And this is, I mean, it's a trick, it means that you can light the paintings to 50 larks. And yet the light in the room changes. So you have an illusion that somehow it's fully daylight. And at the end of that array is a room for plastic casts, which not being light sensitive can have a window to the surroundings. And then coming out back into the corridor, you find a room at the end, which is just for looking at the landscape. Now I need to say that this provision of this room and other rooms in the program where the desire of the client and the client group took a year writing their brief and in writing that brief, they were aided by a local architect who made schemes based on their brief to show them the consequences of what they were thinking. So they modified their brief according to what the outcome would be. And one of their desires was this room, a room that would never have any art in it. It would be a moment where having been in these top-lit spaces, you rediscovered who you were and where you were. And so that room sits in the landscape. And in a way, what I'm hoping is that it lets those people who come to see the gallery understand perhaps in a muted way, but in some kind of way that the land around it is a cultural artifact. The paintings are also cultural artifacts. So in its aim is to connect the territory in which these people have worked or their forebears have worked, the paintings which are painted about the area and which are a source of natural pride, but also to show the breadth of human endeavor. It doesn't just consist in paintings which are special, it consists in many things which are made by people. And one final few things to say is that this building is abstract from this point of view. But what I understand is that we associate abstraction with the modern movement, but actually of course it's always existed. It existed in vernacular buildings which are made and remade and slightly ordered and made more and more economical. And so this is a connection that's particularly important to me and then at certain moments the building, this building element here talks to that building. And this is something that you'll see throughout the projects how there will be quite human perceptual comparisons and connections between things in the landscape around the buildings. Now this is a completely different project it's in London, it's a house, it's urban. And it's an attempt to make a grand house at the European level, like it may be on Stocklay or something like that. And yet it's an attempt to be both individual and contextual and its contextuality is very simple. Achieved, this building line here is in front of that one so the facade aligns with that and then this back aligns with that. So I'm really interested in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of urban design and of course the building parapet aligns. So it's a building which is itself unusual, different from the rest and yet plays its part in the fabric of the street. Let's look inside, then you come in and there's a staircase which is a classical staircase, a staircase that would be recognizable from a Palladio building, it's self-supporting stone staircase. And throughout the house there are buildings that I've seen for a long period of time that I wanted to work with and I make a proposition that this is a building of modernism even though it uses reminiscence. And the argument I make is that if you look outside architecture in modernism, painting literature and music in the early period of modernism quite freely used motifs from the past in combination with the new possibilities of their time. So for example, Stravinsky's Right of Spring contains primitive Russian motifs. So James Joyce's Ulysses uses the Ulysses myth as a structure and then applies vernacular language to it and Picasso repaints Velazquez and it seems to me entirely justifiable to do this without slipping into the irony and pain of post-modernism. And when you come in, first of all you come in through a small courtyard which is outside that door and then you come forward and you come into a room at the back which is like this. So the transition between the city and your private domain is quite sudden and dramatic intentionally dramatic. Coming home is a delight. And in fact a lot of what I do in buildings is to look for pleasure which is a kind of rare commodity in most architecture. A lot of the sharper architects will deal with pain. I'll have no truck with that. So you come into this building and then at the back there's a dining room which projects into the garden so that you could have a party and then go up to the main room above which I'll show in a second and say it's delicious. Along here is a balcony that you see here to the main room on the floor above and from that balcony is an informal staircase that brings you down into the garden. So the gesture is a scale. Do you know the staircase has a scale which is at the scale of the garden and then on that main floor is this room which is, I'll have to do it in feet and inches. This is gonna take somewhere at 20 foot by 39 foot by 20 foot high approximately and it's at the scale of the piano and oboe layer the piano and oboe layer of a small piazza which means a piazza. So it's comfortable in that scale but it's comfortable and it's for the collection of paintings of the owner who's a collector of some substance and the ceiling conceals the lighting and it has some faults in it to do that so that you don't have an array of electric white lighting or painting and then at the front is this bay window which you may have noticed from the facade which turns out to be a place where the only can work and one thing about fenestrated buildings as opposed to buildings which have got lots of glass is that you can, if you stand in the window you can be part of the neighborhood. If you step back you can observe the neighborhood and also windows and doors are not innocent. You know they were invented millennia ago and again just like the abstract vernacular buildings I described earlier, they're changed slightly all the time so they have, if you want to see it, they have fantastic power as of iconography and association. And then on the top floor is the bedroom and this is, I'm only gonna show part of this, this is the bathroom here and a courtyard on the roof, that bathroom's over there so you can come from the bedroom and not have to see any architecture. The architecture's lost in the planting so it's a dream space, you come from dreaming and the architecture doesn't destroy your dreams but in a way the city does something to your dreams because that's what you see. So in the same way as when you come in you leave the city behind you up here you have this pleasure of being in your own space and observing the city. And as Kenneth said we made the British Embassy in Warsaw but in fact it was two projects and this is the first project which regrettably wasn't implemented because in the middle of it there was an attack on the Istanbul Embassy and all projects were put on hold and then by the time it came back policy had changed and in fact we realized on another side we realized only the chancellery which is the chancellery in embassies that's the working building and in this project what was interesting was there was an ambassador's house, a chancellery and then an existing building which was the embassy of Sweden and so together they made a terrific project because these three buildings created a courtyard around here and they looked across to each other and as did this so the courtyard would have been amazing and also an ambassador's house is quite something it's quite formal, there's an array of rooms which are disposed in a certain kind of way where an ambassador can walk between furniture groups and communicate with people and then there's a dining room which has to be intimate for six people and 30 people so it's an amazing project in fact we won this because the foreign office had seen the Red House and thought it looked like an ambassador's house, this is how these things work and so in a direct way what I wanted to do is I wanted to use some very effective typologies so an English country, an English townhouse, an office building, why an office building? Well, office buildings have got a long history if you start from Florence, the Uffici which we now see as a gallery in fact it was an office building so there's that long history of office buildings stretching from the Uffici through to the Seagram building and for me this was really interesting typology just like a door or a window it was something that was full of creative effort through gentle modification so we had these two contrasting forms and we won this because the net to gross and the embassy was fantastically good it's interesting how you win projects you don't win them for talent you win them for the strangest reasons but on the reverse side, the ambassador had a private garden and my ambassadors get heartily sick of being ambassadors and want to wear jeans and play basketball and beat normal people and that's what they do at the back of the house and what's interesting now is that with the after-effect of the Iraq war which Britain entered with America all embassies including the American embassy in Holland and London have become defensive they have to be defended so what would the message be? should it be that it's a defensive building and there have been a number of embassies made which I like that with tiny windows, solid walls but that's the wrong message because embassies have always been a part of cities they've been a part of the culture of cities open to cities, holding events and so the message here we hope was of warmth and conviviality and the facade would be, as I'll show in the realized project would have deep security and I'll show you how we did that but we didn't realize this project but if you're making a project like this which you've never done before you think very hard about what it's like and in fact it's true to say that all of the projects we made, whether they be an art gallery or a museum they're always the first ones that we've ever done so we've never had any experience in anything everything turns out to be original so you have to think very hard and you draw in curious ways like you think about how the facade could be slightly adjusted of the ambassador's house what the corner would be like no ornament maybe a flag what's the window detail like and then what's the relationship between the two buildings and then by some curious miracle we were asked by an Italian publishing company to make a book on our work and we, I chose to make a book about designing the Warsaw Embassy and a book specifically for students of architecture to show how messy design is how avenues are pursued and don't work out and then are replaced with other things I'm not explaining this fully because I can't in the time that we have but it's to show students that it doesn't come directly you have to keep designing you have to design and redesign and then when you've got what you think is a final design then building control issues come in and change it and you have to absorb that so it's a question of gradually coming from a concept to one that's workable and then finding out how that can support the things it needs to do as a real building and that's actually what we did build we built this on another site without a residence and one thing about Poland is that the climate it's very cold in winter, very hot in summer and inevitably, unavoidably this building had to face south so what we did is we made a double facade and that double facade is, I mean it's very crude it's a climate facade you open it top and bottom in the summer and exhaust the heat the winter you close it and it's some highly thermally interlative and all of the glare start with lines on the inside which are much easier to manage because embassies don't maintain themselves properly governments don't maintain their embassies so we did something that was very rudimentary but what it got us was a facade which on the outside I'll just go back reflects the world, reflects the sky, reflects the trees it's worldly in a good sense and then inside it is a building which where you could point a nine millimeter pistol at it and it wouldn't break it or you could, it's bomb resistant on the inside you know the triple glazing it's got 14 millimeter of bank glass in it as well as other things you couldn't really lift a piece of it more than a meter square so it's got two messages one is that it's worldly and the other is that it's defended so both of those things are worth projecting into the world and you probably notice that it has a particular shape which is without being functionalist when you're in denying an embassy there are certain spaces that can't go underneath other spaces because of security issues and in fact when we were building it I arrived on site one day and there were two men, two military men quite short standing like this and I said, who are you? And they said, we're from the department of Europe and we're here to make sure that all the reinforcing rods that go into the building really are reinforcing rods and then they said, well you know the Russians drew a no Russians drew a 30 meter hole under the road to listen to the Brits I mean God knows why since our government is so uninteresting right now but that's another story but let's say from that and also from the fact that an attic is beautiful as a form, then you get a terrace which on one side it's for everybody working in the embassy and the other is for the ambassador to talk to Saddam Hussein or people like those friends of freedom like that so embassy life is a curious thing it's like a kind of theater of cruelty but in front of all of that is a place where dignitaries come I mean when you come into an embassy you either arrive and go into a garage which I'll show you or if you're another ambassador or the Queen of England you have to have some ceremonial space and my minimalism gave way to some maximalism here this is the entrance and by accident when the doors open Scotland goes in one direction and England in the other that's another thing these things happen by chance in the back of your mind you somehow but inside the space there's the ground floor has a place where you have trade events and then the floor above is the work space and this facade let me see if I can, no wait a second that's the facade we first looked at but here is a blastproof garden you know it's interesting the building regulations in Warsaw are very strict because there isn't a lot of daylight in the winter so you can't do what you can in the UK have a 20 meter floor plate it's beyond building regulations so you have lots of daylight which makes it very quiet, very peaceful and then if you come in by car you go through a gate house which I'm not illustrating and your car is searched and if you're an ambassador or somebody is allowed to bring in a car this door opens and you have a garage but if you're a member of the public like me I mean the pastors had to go to your embassy in London and collect a visa standing in the street with my passport in a Tesco's back that's not something I want to do to other people so this is a climb-proof glass fence so if you're a visa person you come and you see all of this stuff you enjoy the embassy as much as anybody else and then at the back is a constant visa entrance just for you which is just as dignified as the one for the ambassadors and here's another instance for in a completely different town it's in Belgium, a town called Dynsen in Belgium and we won this in competition and there's this very interesting state of mind in European politics, provincial politics this is a provincial town hall and they are looking for procedural transparency and for making a town hall which is a public object and I'll explain how that works in a minute but so it's got two bits to it two elements, it's got this building which is for city officials to work and then this which is the debating chamber with offices underneath it and both of them have a lozier facade this is just about works and keeping it low energy it's naturally ventilated it's got tall ceilings so you maintain working by daylight as much as possible and you shade the facade with this lozier and the building is at the beginning of the town you come across a bridge here which is difficult to see but on one side is a church and on the other side is the town hall our town hall and it's curious self-way talks to that these two buildings talk to each other mainly through the fact that they're both made of stone they're just about talking to each other I mean this one's talking in medieval Flemish and this one's talking in contemporary English so they get along and then on the other side it doesn't just talk to the grander buildings it actually talks to all of this because cities are made with things like this they're not always great they're often made quite expediently and so the simplicity of this building aims to talk to them not to embarrass it to be inclusive and it's made of quite standard Flemish construction material it's precast concrete and then this is an Italian stone which is cast onto precasts and you can see it's some very muted but it actually has some dignity and to go back to the issue of the lojahs this here is the lojah on the debating chamber and both of these look over a river which is rather wonderful and these lojahs aren't simply a technical device because actually this is how municipal workers in Belgium eat they take food to work and they cook it in a large canteen and then they eat together so it's very civilized and they have views of the river too so again it's very inclusive and the offices are good because this office for example on the corner has got what it has a balcony here and a balcony here so most office spaces that you're working inadvertently are prisons and you sit in them all day and you can't go out in this building the lojahs are a place where you could smoke a cigarette or have a private conversation or actually have a meeting and they love it they love this building my colleagues happen to go there they're fantastically warm about it and this is not a posed photograph this is these children where children happen to be there when the photographer was there and when we were in the middle of designing it there was an incident at Flemish Town Hall where some politicians were attacked and we said look we can provide security very discreetly through the embassy we could provide it you would hardly notice it and they said no we want people to be able to walk everywhere because this building belongs to everybody in the city so it's very, I mean it's heartwarming to work for people like that and then this is the council chamber but it's not just a council chamber this is where people get married and they have ceremonies so it's a real civic room and it looks out to the city and the city looks back to it and it's a possession of what the people have done so and further along in Antwerp and Belgium where you just in the last year completed these two towers in an array of six towers two by Dina and Dina two by Doverchipper Field and two by us and it's an interesting project because the developer of the initial developer was a very sophisticated Antwerp developer with great taste who ran out of money in the middle of it and had to sell the project so David Chippfield's first building which I'm not showing which is over here was rather opulent and then the budget dropped so he lost all of his balconies and then when he came to us it dropped to about here and we said so they said it was bought by a very good but rather tough builder developer I mean in Belgium if you go for lunch with the developer they really eat they can really eat and they're cultivated guys so there's a pleasure but we said they said what do you want to make it from and I said well concrete like Professor Chippfield and they said well you can't and we said well why can't we and they said because it's too expensive what can we use and they said brick and I said 16 floors high I mean it's not unusual here and they said yeah we do it all the time and so we built it in brick so what do you do with two brick buildings well if you make them effectively the same building you make them look different you know this one's got a horizontal emphasis and that one's got a vertical emphasis which turned out to be the simplest idea ever and the most difficult thing to do because if the bricks project then they have to have a high frost resistance and then the color of the brick gets darker and you know but I won't bore you with that also that's right originally we were going to use a clay brick which is uneven and the contractor said well we're going to glue the bricks together okay well it's not irrational it's called thin bed mortar because they couldn't point around all of the brick heads you see so we had a sample made in clay bricks and it looked awful so we anyway I won't bore you with the story we did it in the end and it worked so this is part of a development I'd say a development in the practice from making buildings I'd lodge on detail and very considerate which I still do I'll show you at least you can pause the house at the end but to buildings for developers where you have to get potency in the image and I just doesn't connect really but I'll say it what interests me about SOLIDWITS war drawings is that they come from a series of instructions which I've written to other people but that's where the difference ends with SOLIDWIT the the SOLIDWIT war drawings are carried out by people who badly want to work for SOLIDWIT and a practicing artist whereas in the building industry you're working with people who go home at 5 o'clock and not the same kind of people so let's say by a process of induction between SOLIDWIT and me I wanted to make a series of images that would be very simple and yet over time would be compelling and it's actually turned out that way so what do you do well you keep the corners open otherwise you end up with a tower like David was compelled to make with the corners closed and then you open the top and the builder was the developer was it's very funny about this he said it would be much easier if you had a course of brick run underneath to support them which is true and I said well look if it's to be architecture it has to have at least one difficult detail and they all roared with Larafton and then we went off to lunch and that's how it went but it's animation comes from the fact that depending on who's in you get a different building but there are important things to do if you're doing something like this you have to be very careful for example all the lighting and the balconies doesn't come from the Sophie which is standardly how you do it it's lit from the balustrade and it's not easy you probably need the torch to see if you're eating outside but it means that you get these lit forms and in the entrant so if you can steer the project in the right way you can be simple and it's very charming when you're designing things you've got these thoughts that don't pan out in reality we thought what if people climbed up it they're not going to climb up they'd need to be gymnasts to climb up it so we did this David, my partner suggested this and then we looked at it and we said you know that scene in Star Trek where they all disappear it was a bit like that but it's got some dignity the landscaping is rather good it's by a French landscaper so it's very tasteful and then it has a this is white brick which is more expensive than red brick so we can only use a bit of it it was like that but you have to get the entrance all right so what auto is important about the open corner as well it means that somehow the appearance of the birding works with the fragmented character of the view of the dog yard because this is Antwerp dogs which will change over time and so unlike the other birdings which have a more immediate context this doesn't have such an intimate relationship with birdings around it it has a view over a changing city and it seems to me that a building like that or a corner like that is important but also you can see the fabric of the birding so tactility is at work for you the birding gives more of itself to you and then of course it embraces the view and it's comfortable because you're on view somehow you've got some discretion about being seen and seeing and just to amuse you this is Roger Deena's scheme being struck by lightning while we're being spared so I haven't shown this to Roger so we're still friends that's David's birding which has got the bark in his and this is David's where the nose and ears were cut off they said making corners open is very difficult and we said well we're not going to change it and then they said good and we did it this is in what's very interesting is that unlike other architects we are constantly working in the back of beyond like in Neuhausen which is an inconsequential city only claim to fame is this huge waterfall amazing waterfall which is a tourist attraction and I went to see it and we're building up here we'll be building up here and I stood by it and I said can you turn it off I mean it was kind of fantastically impressive so there's lots of double glazing anyway this is the situation it's very typical, Swiss cities don't really often have urban design there villages that have become towns so this is the location of our project and it's an adjunction between residential and shopping and an industrial area so it has these rather well-mannered Swiss factories I mean very elegant and this new piazza is called an industrial place and so well what did we do well we this is important this is a building which has a south sunlight coming to the side of it so we said okay look we can make we can make a form of a building which has got several parts to it which exploits its relationship with this and leaves a hole at the back so the people behind don't get fed up with our local planning approval and this is what it looks like this is a kind of you know you work in series when you start to have more work than normal you start to work in series this is a series of horizontality and verticality I mean it's about as simple as that but this was originally made of concrete but it's now made of stucco and it's got three parts it's got three parts it's got this part that looks over the waterfall this part that looks over the piazza south and this bit that well it speaks to the other side of the street but it did and then the minute that we got planning approval somebody got planning approval 25 story building here so we kind of lost that but cities change all the time so you have to be a bit more astute I guess and romantic but it's made of stucco with different types of stucco and the apartments look over the piazza will have this view and then those ones looking over the waterfall have this view so they'll be beautiful they're not expensive apartments I mean this town doesn't support expensive apartments so they're quite ordinary apartments and so this was the beginning of people in switzerland being interested in this and we were asked to compete in the competition for swiss radio and television with two friends on the jury who said this one is for you never believe it it does work either way no they can't, you can't influence the jury the juries make their own minds swiss radio and television it's very interesting because they wanted a building which was very very public on the ground florida has a big restaurant and then they wanted all of this to show the working of the newsroom, you know newsrooms are very very exciting and then the computers on the top this was our first all glass building and I'll show it to you so this is a view from the first floor to the second floor that's the ground floor people come in here and there's like a constant there's an amphitheater there where the news is constantly being played and then above it it's the room where they actually make the news so you see both parts of the process and then up here it's a huge was, would have been a huge it would have been a canteen for the whole of the campus this whole campus is about broadcasting so but unlike the front which is like that the back is like this so it's got this deep cut in it facing south and what you can see down here is a courtyard, a public courtyard so you come in through this rather imposing iconic building and then you find that actually it's full of planting like this and the offices are arranged around it I'll show you a plan in a minute but they're arranged around it so you've got lofts reconfigurable lofts but you have a sense you can see your colleagues across the glass and one thing that's important for me when I look at office burnings in London it's the upward view with endless amounts of fluorescent lighting and air conditioning grills and I thought we could do better than that so we demonstrated with the Swiss lighting engineer that we could light on the desk and upward with a tiny bit of incidental lighting we could put air in through the floor so when you look up into this project you only see lit ceilings a bit like the corner barricade is in the project and Antwerp so this explains the layer you have three wings of offices with WC's and lifts and all that kind of stuff in the middle this is the thing that really interested me most was an only gently heated outdoor space with a glass block floor and it was where the café was it was the coffee room so that people would meet in that space informally or they would work informally in that space and then going back down to the first floor this is the restaurant but we pinched it into shapes we that could be divided off that could be divided off so if you these kinds of eating areas are used maybe twice a day and then what you got is a huge space full of chairs and everything in it so we figured that we should make it more intimate and we also put a café here opposite the newsroom because this building was to be connected to the rest of the campus by these air bridges so we thought ok let's say somebody wants to meet well you let's say they would say let's meet in the café that overlooks the newsroom and looks down to the public space so we in this building although it's demonstrably flexible it also is some it has a sense of place which is what building should have and then this is the entrance floor that's a big outdoor courtyard and that's the public restaurant and so the staff come in and they're seen by the public and that's the news theatre so it was a real melee of things happening and this final plan is to show you the pleasure that we hope that you would achieve that area in the middle would have plants in it this would have plants in it so these hard bit newsmen would be made more tolerable by all of this we thought but we lost it to a Swiss project that looked almost exactly the same as ours but slightly more Swiss which is how it works if you've got a public corporation they're in fantastically risk averse they understandably don't want to take a risk with a foreign architect so you have to understand that but this was something we did some time ago in central Amsterdam and the backstory to this is that for a long period of time Dutch housing was all social housing and it meant that people couldn't move and they couldn't move up because it was a sort of rubik cube of tendencies and then the government in this very Dutch way decided they were going to create a market housing situation so they released land for development and Amsterdam in fact owns I'd say about 90% of the land in the city so it could do this it also moderates the price of the land so that they can get experimental housing and what that let happen is that the housing associations became developers, experimental developers because they could borrow against their stock of housing which was enormous and they made a series of buildings like this this is called Solid 11 in their parlance and another version of it they made three one by MVRDV and this one by us and it's one of three buildings in central Amsterdam all of the three had to have pairs of buildings with a courtyard in the middle and one of them down here is a psychiatric hospital it's social housing so it's completely rather wonderful and chaotic Dutch social mix but I was very interested don't ask me why I was very interested in the buildings of Chicago at the turn of the century with their sobriety and yet their boldness and the sort of strange things that happen in them and so that what one hopes is that people cycle by this they'll see things developing they'll develop their view of why this burning is the way that it is and it's courtyard in the middle is really a social space and the district in Holland nobody has curtains so they really can see each other and there's a mix there's a dentist a Polish dentist and Carol Leher-Dresu living room and then there are conventional apartments which were they're fitting out of the apartments by the tenants so they're all very different and what this shows is the generosity of these windows if you don't know what's going to happen in a place and you need to have fairly regular fenestrations so that people can put walls anyway and so this is a glass balustrade so you open the doors and you have Amsterdam pours in through the window and then this shows that you really are in a city this is a really urban building and this isn't for everybody this is a place where only certain types of person who want to live in the city live by choice so the rest of this is really housing which is where we moved to from art buildings and this is in Amsterdam north now Amsterdam north was no man's land in Holland the Amsterdam that you would know is the south of the river which had the canal plans and the canal houses and the north was always places where they hanged people or put people in prison in a place that people wanted to develop but there is a housing shortage in Amsterdam and Amsterdam city works on that and this was a development with ING Bank of an area which had been the research terrain of shell petrol which that's the last original tower and so this had two characteristics first of all it was on the water and then you got cruise ships which were as tall as this building passing by it but it also had a kind of placelessness and so what do you do there what do you aim for to make a building which somehow could be in Manhattan or could be in Brussels sort of ubiquitously placeless and yet rich building and I made these giant balconies which were a kind of course celebrity with glass block fours and most apartments have got two of these giant balconies because Alvaro Caesar got the building in front of us because you know because he's Alvaro Caesar so you have balconies you can look around Alvaro Caesar's building to see the river you see and so it's it starts with a format of gridded facades with two types of window and then it's in a rather British way it's played empirically wherever there's an opportunity for a view a balcony occurs so it gets a kind of irregularity in moments like this in moments like that but this is much much more affordable in the center in the west of Amsterdam and so it's four identically planned buildings in different orientations and when you get a an urban design in Holland you wonder what they were thinking about you can't imagine why it was the way it was and we said to the city who planned it could we not do something a bit more and they said stop just don't even think about it so we made a building where you could stretch the apartment surround the perimeter so they'd get a view and sunlight and we also had to make a building which was the same format but which looked good as a pair or looked good as a freestanding elevation and this eccentricity let's say that comes from adjustment and expediting the view gives that power to this building and the entrance doors are also important in these buildings you know this some each of them has an identifying mark on the floor so when you come home it's not generic it's a place you live in and this is what it looks like and this is on fantastically low budget and then in the north of Holland in Den Helder which is that's a really interesting place it's a naval town and it had a big problem which is that that it's middle class people kept leaving so it was a uniformly working class culture it was poor and the municipality asked a number of um planners to plan I think even you where Stephen Hall was involved in I think even Stephen Hall wasn't involved in this the only building in Europe that he had no hand in is this building okay they engage the developer and they said can you build a middle class housing and okay we can do that and this is that's you're in Hearst and that's me wearing similar shoes but I have a longer overcoat because he's Northern European he doesn't feel you know I'm from the south and we're not talking to each other we're talking to our office but this is between the sites between two canals this is the smaller canal and all of this was removed as I'll show but on the other side there was a giant canal looking over a Napoleonic dockyard of some beauty which had been restored I mean in Holland they do do these things to encourage business you know the municipality will spend money on fine buildings and will try to inculcate industry so it has beautiful boats and then opposite is that's by Urund what happens in Holland is you get an urban conceptualizer who is a sort of tyrant we had West 8 doing it so you say couldn't we organize it but better no it has to be random okay I mean that's the nature of cities if you think of Paris after housemen some poor architect got the triangular site on the roundabout and did something brilliant with it that's what you're doing in master plans you're making sense of something that doesn't make sense so here we are what am I doing well we I think had a love affair with Dutch canal housing for a long time I thought I'd do one so it's some got good brick work generous windows a tiny bit of stone if you look at those Dutch canal houses they're fantastically economical and that's what it looks like in the range obliquely and then at the end that's the stockyard that I just spoke about and then at the end at least two buildings shop on the corner with a bit of stone embellishment and then back this row of houses which are two bedders for people in retirement people are starting a family so it's very being in Holland is fantastically rewarding I can't tell you and then between those two rows of houses there's some it captures the view of the town so it's situated then it's part of the town without being too mimetic now this is a really strange project this is some a cafe restaurant in front of the Tower of London replacing a 70's building with a GRP diagrid roof from which when we took it down along Tower Bridge was some electrical wiring which we had tested and it turned out to be the alarm system for the Crown Jewel House so we covered it back over and how do you make a building like this well there's two types of approach that we saw one evident in the ticket office further up which is a high tech building which says I have nothing to do with the Tower of London by the way I'm high tech and I'm part of the development of the road and then there's another type of building which is along the key side which are sort of garden hearts from which you can buy food and they're painted brown and they say we're invisible and I being me wanted to compose a building with the Tower of London I mean you do it simply by using a natural material which is wood and painting but other things like this is one of these upside down and this is like a boat house when you do this kind of stuff it used to be called English Heritage but now it's called something like England with an exclamation mark governments go to any amount of expense to waste money and so we sat with these people they were very decent, I mean they're academics well in fact the story was that the Tower of London thought it would be really clever to give the whole project including the architecture to the caterer you see you know hands free so the caterer said but we've never made a building before so they arrived with this terrible scheme and English Heritage said we're not having that so they had a competition and we won it and then we met the caterer it was like an arranged marriage you know we arrived and tore the veil away and then we were and then the caterer at the middle of it the caterer said I can't do any of this I'm just a chef so historic Royal Palaces which is a quango which to British term it means an unelected body which looks after, it's private but it's kind of public said we'll handle this we'll hire you directly so they did and they said would you like to do a would you like to gift shop for the Crown Jaw House and we said yeah okay we didn't come off but we got the job and then we did this and it's intended not just for tourists it's actually intended for the hotels around there and the business people so it sits on the edge of the moat from this view it's bigger than Renzo Piano's Shard but this is a perspectival effect but it sits on the moat so it's romantic you look out and you see the taravond but also unashamedly cornily you look at Tower Bridge Tower Bridge is a fun example of Victorian ugliness you know they really spared no expense to make the world worse and actually kind of vigorous in a way so but there's nowhere on the key this is one of those innocent buildings that doesn't exist but there's nowhere on the key you can study this monster but you can from our restaurant and then the outdoor space this has retractable blind so you can extend the eating season you see so it has sunshade but also waterproof so that you can you can eat outdoors but actually one thing that keeps happening in my work is that this rhymes with that and it's interesting when I look at Caesar's work what I recognize in how he draws and then finally makes the buildings what I think architects of any caliber to you is that they see things they see all the obvious things but actually in an area they don't quite understand they notice things and it's in that noticing you get these kind of associational qualities that come from the building when you're focusing on doing it for other reasons and Camden Art Centre well this was originally a library I'll show you the model first it was a local library built by subscription so it was built between something like 1819 1920 and photographs of it are finished and then it was taken over by an arts organization Camden Art Centre very good really incredibly good they had an ad-rine art show that was amazing and they turned this public library into a series of art spaces themselves and then eventually they got some money to improve it and we ordered the insides and then we put on the front we put an entrance here because originally you had to go up these stairs and you couldn't disabled access was impossible so we provided a staircase there and you come in through it there as I show and on the back a cafe so this is what it's like so it's completely different and yet it's totally similar and it has certain alignments which fix it together in a way what I'm saying about this building is that it's a building that other people have made and will continue to make so what we're doing is just one stage in this but when you come in you see the ceramic studio it's always what's been interesting about this building is it's not just an exhibition space it's a space where the public learns to make things and there are a number of artists that I know who had their first drawing lessons in this place so it's hugely important and when we got this project we said don't change it don't change it at all so we had to change it we had to change the gallery as little but we kept them looking as they were even though we put air conditioning into some of them but in the ground floor area which nobody knew we could do anything so we drove this line of sight through from back to front to a cafe because the book shop originally had been on the first floor so their sales were very low and these kinds of marginal organisations need to exploit every commercial advantage they can so the book shop say it's unavoidable and then there's a cafe which they can draw the curtains have artists' dinners in there and things like that and that is that additional I showed which composes with this and then it has a garden outside and this is much higher than the street this is a London bus, a double decker London bus, so from the top of the bus you see this garden so you have to constantly make people aware of this but this garden and the book shop and the cafe provided those kinds of facilities which was though it was wealthy and highly populous it had none of those things so this has become a venue outside its role as an art organisation and this screen is an acoustic screen I mean partially acoustic from the road but it looks like this now and we worked with well we worked with a group of artists female collective of artists and architects called Muff and they worked with the gardener not the gardener, but the gardener Julie who'd been caring for the garden so it looks like this now and these are the gallery spaces so for this one when we got there it's very noisy the road is very noisy and they very expediently put secondary glazing in and we took all that out got all the windows refurbished and made them fit so we got the same level of acoustic performance as before but we restored the room to its more original condition and we lowered the lighting slightly we wanted we talked to the artists who'd worked in the space for a long period of time and there were small things that we did to make it better we moved the escape door so that it was less evident and things like that and then in this gallery it originally had roof lights like this and we put them back in but we put them in a different order and we put acoustic absorbent in here because if you have two artists first of all you need voice intelligibility but you also need to contain that sound so that other people who are just trying to see the art have got some privacy too and house for two artists we came upon this scheme where two artists who originally painted houses for us eventually got muddy and then employed us which was a rather wonderful reversal and they bought this site in Aldgate and it's in the street rather good street of Georgian houses although this one is reconstruction but this building had been rebuilt in a very ungainly way and we couldn't rip it down so we covered it with we used a red stucco which was too red and then one of the artists over painted it in black so it's rather special and then what were we doing we said that all of these windows would be metal on the inside and wood on the outside and high performance and that they would have some equivalence to these this is a modern version of that and then this alignment was important these things are important, they're very small but it means that this then becomes a figure of some significance and then this railing has some character which is similar to that window and these have some scale of relationship to that and then the ground floor is like a shop but it isn't and this is the section so the facade we were looking at was here and the backside is lower and so this is the there are two studios, Tim who paints is in the basement and then Joe he's a lady partner who works with photography and he's up here with the lights very good so this is Tim's studio and we said how much light do you want and he said not a lot and so this works well for him and then that's the kitchen and that looks out into the street and then their bedroom, the bathroom is facing the street so that the bedroom is quiet and it provides a buffer and these are white glass windows and then there's a ventilator that opens up so you can lie in the bathroom and look at the street and then that's their bedroom and then they care for their children so their children gravitate between the two studios and that's some of his studio on the top floor and another housing project in London with a doctor's surgery and then duplexes and then a small apartment block and we used a very irregular brick which we again we over painted it black so it had some color similarity to the surrounding area which has got dirty and it faces south over the street and that's the garden in front of the doctor's surgery and this is the section, so that's the street elevation we were looking at and this is the reverse side so that's the doctor's surgery and then that's the small apartment building which is part of the development but these are duplexes so you come along here along a walkway and there's a courtyard it's just got railings and then that's northwest and this is south and you come in and then there's two bedrooms so that's the plan so that courtyard is a sort of rudimentary device for, well you can pain your bicycle or have a barbecue or all that kind of stuff but it also means that you get some awareness of your neighbor you can part your bicycle and then you come in as the kitchen which opens in two directions in a living room south facing balcony and then two bedrooms and two bathrooms above and that's the walkway and you look through so at certain times when everything is open you get a sense of how people live and how your neighbors are and we're getting close to the end now this is some housing for the same developer, a very small developer who called the daylight, he's a very charming guy, this is this is a house garage, porch balcony, window, window and it's a tiny development with a bungalow at the end and there's a view, the site slopes down and there's a view over the south down towards the south so this upper level which can be a teenager's room can be a granny flat can be a studio looks out over that and then at the top of the development there's a freestanding house which has got fantastic views over the south downs and they look at each other you know if you can create the rudimentary rudiments of society without being overbearing, without forcing people in contact with each other but just giving them the space to look out of their kitchen window to the street but here there's a door which opens into this garden, now these not tower elements like that but actually the back bit is only a single story high and the reason for that is that their repeats and the south sun comes in like that and so the facade that's the garage but the facade equivalent to that is blank so you get a complete garden which is private but with a sideways view into the street so again all of these small moves let you either block them up or be sociable and this is the final project it's for Anish Kapoor and it's is it a house or it isn't really sites in Chelsea incredibly difficult to find, the red house took a long time for the owner to find Anish had to buy the leases on an apartment building, I'm not going to show in order to get a very very long ground floor and so this is the entrance to the apartment building so that's the entrance to Anish's house and that's his garage and it's very long, the only opportunity for light was either through the rear elevation or in the depth of the plan from above so when you come in that's the entrance door looking back all of these surfaces are reflective mildly reflective so that you sustain the small amount of daylight you've got into the plan, it's not unusual, it's what is done in Dutch canal houses at the back of the room you have a mirror so you use lacquer and stainless steel you might see there that's, well you can see it here this is lacquer and then the stone is slightly reflective and then there's an lighting slot which supports the light so there's an illusion that carries you into seeing this courtyard here which it's a very confusing shot because it's got a Dan Graham sculpture in the middle of it so that's a star shaped courtyard and then you look into the living room there's a stair that takes you up to the first floor of bedrooms but we'll go through the the living room to show you how it works so that's the staircase I mentioned there's a change of level that's where you die and that's where you live and then on the other side is um the other side this is an Anish Kapoor sculpture not a building failure I'll have you know and then you come to the end and there's a garden which is now very very overgrown and very beautiful and the side of it is a corridor with a library in it which takes you along past the garden to the bedroom at the back the bedroom this is the parent's bedroom the children's bedrooms are in the other block and this is like a little house you know it's configured as a little house and then there's a stair that takes you down underneath the garden to the bathroom this is what you have to get up to because loads of sites are always too small and too expensive but if we come back here and we go back up um then you come to the top floor and there's a glass floor the big as I said the big issue is to get light in so this is a glass floor that extends into a courtyard as I show that's the courtyard and that's the glass floor so these top rooms are arranged around a courtyard and um so there's children's bedrooms there and um a family room here and then the only elevation in fact is that the end thank you thank you for a great presentation um I wanted to ask in the first project you mentioned you described how the client had gone through a big process of determining the rules working with an architect to test out how those rules would play out and then you told us how you broke that rule right away by siding the building in a different area so I guess my question is how do you decide which rules to break and which rules to follow you take a huge risk and my business partner said do you want to win this competition and I said yeah and he said well don't do that and I said well I think I have to and they liked it that's why we won they said it was a modest statement and the other thing that we did means we had a rendering made which looked like an oil painting so we won the watch on that one you know it's interesting how you win things um what other questions have you got now I can answer so I always have an oil painting and always break the right rule Christian so I was surprised what you presented and what you didn't present because you talked a lot about views and about developers and about how things or how the project came together but one can see in your architecture that there is tremendous love for material and materiality and you almost avoided that topic to talk to us about that it's true it's wondering why every designer has lacuna when I first saw James Sterling talk about the Cambridge Library he described it as a functionalist and we thought what is this and I saw Dan Graham talk and he I'd written about the pavilions that he made which I find fantastically interesting in that wherever their place they seem to be in place and I said Dan said oh that was my anthropological phase and you couldn't get any sense out of them so this is one of the problems of designers somehow there's certain things that we don't talk about it's also rather British you know there's just some belief that somehow if you get the fundamentals right everything else would be alright it's not different from tailoring or shoes you know it's a ridiculously Irish problem that I have but well you could draw me on this I mean I'm not being evasive but I'm explaining the reality of as I came here I thought should I talk differently about the work and I thought what can I possibly say so you could ask me a question and we could perhaps have a conversation about what your point is about the care of materials and well I'd choose them they are chosen for visual strategic reasons but also what I'll explain is that when I made the building called the listening gallery there was a particular thing that happened and I had been working in performance for a very short time you know maybe six months and I worked with a performance group and what struck me about their work was that they were using almost exactly the same things that Nike used or engaged with their people places articles of use rooms but they were able to see the social and political values in those objects and when I came to design the listening gallery suddenly all of those elements of the building and I could see them as being charged, politically charged but of course when I think about it it's not innocent I think about how they look but the aesthetic is very much in combination with these other ambitions I mean I did a career in Belfast and the students there were very interesting because they spoke almost exclusively about the importance of their buildings and I hadn't heard that before Irish architecture is quite different from British architecture and that it's concerned with real architectural issues you know but I find that rather difficult to do I'm hesitant to make purely formal statements I mean I've got a lot better ability anyway but it always had to happen inadvertently but when I was doing the towers in Antwerp I kind of knew what I thought it would look like but I suppose I'm very resistant to architecture which is which is only aesthetic or it's highly aesthetic because I think that I'm political in spirit I'm not highly democratic so I'm not people from the left would discount me but as an architect I'm interested in how you could make communicative architecture so aesthetics is part of that of that desire and a very important part I mean the red sign of the red house was chosen because I wanted to make something which was opulent but would work with the surroundings which was red brick you know having spent time in Holland where every building shouted I just I don't I can't bear it I just don't want to do that so I wanted to do lots of things at the same time including make beauty which was fantastically important to me but it's one part of a wider enterprise does that go way to but I can do it I can do beautiful stuff too in your early career I think I read that you said you worked you were in a dialogue with quite a few other London architects and talking about what London architecture could be and I was wondering was this a dialogue that was very helpful to you in developing what your work was and were you able to continue with that or did your career become more isolated Bill actually what happened was that without being a modest when I made the listing gallery it changed everything for the subsequent generation like Cruz Isengine and Sergeis and Bates who say that the sensibility that I opened up in the way that I described it to Christian gave a basis for making a completely different type of architecture because David Chipford for example who I respect very much was making shops for Izimiyaki and very beautiful they were but I didn't want to do that I wanted to do this more but political architecture in a way and so I without any fear of contradiction I started all of that and two generations of architects have been working if they have that sensibility they're working so we did in the beginning we did start a writing group called papers on architecture but for a number of reasons it fell apart the interesting thing is that almost everybody who's participated in that went on to leave the UK and become professors in European universities and wrote it so it did stimulate that but we couldn't realize it in the UK for lots of reasons you know I think the interesting thing is what leads to a culture of architecture because you know I think that as at this very moment there's a much stronger culture of architecture in Ireland than there is in England and it I find it interesting how when you end the lecture you know you return to England in a way and you move away from the the possibilities of larger scale development and the possibilities for civic work which I think you know for me what you've achieved the best of what you've achieved is this civic work and this large scale development and it's very noticeable that when you return to the English scene everything drops down you know not only the scale but also the quality of the material in a way but Ken did those schemes are not in sequence they're associative I mean Anish's occurred in a different sequence so the project in Dynter came later than Anish's no but it's not just the time it's got to do with the place don't you think it isn't a question of the time sequence it's got to do with the climate of the country and the I just think that if you compare the British scene and the Irish scene for example it seems to me the Irish scene in general is much stronger today than the British scene in terms of architectural culture it's true although Irish architects have quite a lot of difficulty in getting the scale of work that suits their talents but you know Rietveld you know as an architect a designer of considerable international reach made large buildings but a lot of his career consisted of making individual houses for people of modest means and I reviewed a book of his houses and they were the range was from kind of uninteresting to brilliantly interesting and there's nothing wrong in practice it operates at different scales because that's how the work comes you have to just accept that that's how it is we pitch for civic jobs some we get some we don't and you do other things as well but it's significant that the civic jobs are not in the UK there is civic work but the way that you get them is it's rather confined and we always win those projects on design and then lose them on fees because the way that civic buildings are procured to use a horrible word in the UK is central government has put local authorities municipalities under such financial pressure that they have to sell their land in order to build new civic elements and that means they have to engage with developers and that means that they are conscious and then they have review boards that don't let them permeate architects purely on the basis of design so it's the practices that work in that field are very skillful at pitching their fees right but it's harder to build civic work in the UK and in Europe there is greater funding in Belgium they want to build civic buildings and they provide money for it I think what happened in the British case is this concentration of power in London and the neoliberal politics destroyed all the fiscal bases of municipalities throughout the country Well it changed it dramatically and as I say local authorities have to extract money in any way that they can and in order to do that they have to be they're under surveillance in a way for costs but you just have to accept that I mean a lot of when you were working in the UK a lot of social housing was incredibly low budget but people managed to do things within it and some you win some you lose you know when we the housing that we did for that smaller developer he's much more elastic with money because he wanted to experiment so it's a tough business to ruin you just do what you can do and you do it as well as you can you make something of it and that's what differentiates our work that nothing leaves the office until it's interesting you know we make every project interesting none of it's just run in the mill First of all I think it's very refreshing to see this work and the in the context of this particular institution and how things are described here let's say but I'm very I mean it's also very difficult to penetrate some of the thought I think it's rather guarded I have a simple question so the sequence of the lecture was obviously sought out very carefully but it's hard to go beyond the notion that somehow you zoomed in on detail and ultimately into a very elaborate you know renovation design can you say more about how you put this together and this lecture? Yeah and how does it lead to a future let's say in your thought about architecture and where you're going you know well I put the lecture together so that there's some contrast to scales you know you try not to have too many of the same type of project yet there's a value in continuity so you do it almost like a designer you look at it and you think how will it engage an audience basically so it's not it's not in time sequence the lecturing doesn't really influence my thinking about architecture my thinking about architecture occurs by looking at buildings like the things we're looking at with the students in the UK looking at Louis Kahn again and your attitude to architecture and the way that you want to do it changes as you build things you accumulate a set of capabilities and you think how can I what can I do next and you look actually for the project that will give you the possibility of an imaginative leap does that answer your question? No it's good I mean you find that the context of teaching design has changed or their constants then I caught one little phrase at the very beginning the irony and pain of post-modernism so you obviously we've been in the same place yeah well but of course students change you know the formation but it seems to me that there's a certain style of humanistic thought that existed in all students I've taught for the last 40 years you know they are interested in fundamentally the same thing you would have thought that maybe they would all become rabidly concerned with their career but it doesn't seem so you know they are social beings and that's very comforting I must admit but let's talk about post-modernism I saw something very interesting there's a young Swiss practice called Lucien's Padmada band who you probably haven't heard of but they're re-engaged with Venturi's book complexity and contradiction and they're interpreting it in a fantastically intelligent way very scrupulously they're saying that they they're not doing what I see Venturi doing kind of going off to service the American establishment they're much they're taking its intelligence very seriously and they're very serious guys so their work is quite new and it will take some time but they're going to be really interesting I went to the we went to the van of Venturi house and I was astonished by how inept it was it's incredible, a really really bad piece of work I'm afraid and how does he get such airplay well that's another thing you wonder why how buildings get built do you realize the clients on any kind of other planet sometimes it happens but I mean I read complexity and contradiction and was very affected by it and I'm going to have to read it again I think I'm going to have to read it very carefully again it was a completely enlightening book but why they went off the way they did I really don't know they were so punk when they started you know it was really interesting and then suddenly it wasn't so I mean there is considerable interest amongst generation of architects perhaps in their early 40s and people like Stirling who I just I didn't get it but I think some of them are interested in the sort of vulgar version of postmodernism and some like Lieutenant Spadman are interested in the intelligence of postmodernism and actually in the red house when it first was published critics asked if it was a postmodern building but it wasn't and my argument is that it's a building of its time that can avail itself of different types of architecture which still have utility in the present time for those of us who have tried to achieve such a pure level of aesthetic expression we know that it's rather complex today to deal with everything we need to hide including insulation mechanical services etc so especially in Europe where insulation is kind of mandatory dressing becomes something that's very prominent and I suppose that most of the works that you've shown us have you probably spent a lot of time designing the wall section and what you've shown us is probably only one very small aspect of your entire design of the wall so can you say something about your attitude or your approach to dressing today when the wall sections become more and more they hide more and more in effect well we should do it and actually when I was at Daft I began with my chair saying we would have the greenest architecture in the department and I couldn't get anybody to teach it they have endless chairs of building construction but they don't teach it and really the question is how can it be absorbed into the general practices of architecture which isn't simply about techniques it's about the experience of buildings civic messages and that's a completely fascinating project and it's one that I don't explore enough in my work to make it nearly self-sufficient but that's really what one should be doing I think it's not a good answer but it's what we should be doing I think we should be bringing the event to an end so I want to thank you once again for a very stimulating work