Table Of Content50 ARCHITECTS 50
BUILDINGS
The buildings that inspire architects
50 ARCHITECTS 50
BUILDINGS
The buildings that inspire architects
Edited by Pamela Buxton
Photographs by Gareth Gardner and Edward Tyler
Introduction
The Architects
1. Workplace
2. Education
3. Cultural Buildings
4. Individual Housing
5. Housing Developments
6. Places of Worship
7. Public Buildings
Picture credits and acknowledgements
Index
Introduction
Buildings that inspire architects
How do architects get their ideas? How do they learn from other
people’s buildings to make their own work richer and more
satisfying? Architects draw on all sorts of amazing sources,
including music, fine art, numbers and nature, but all architects
visit other people’s buildings, whether as a deliberate act of
pilgrimage, a fact-finding mission or, inescapably, in the course
of day-to-day life. For many architects, one building stands out
as having had a transformative and long-term impact on their
own designs. In this book architects share these often life-
changing encounters with other architects’ amazing buildings.
Pamela Buxton had the very enviable job of taking fifty of the
most interesting architects working in Britain today to visit the
buildings which have inspired them most. Commissioned by the
architectural publication Building Design, the records of these
trips by Pamela and photographers Gareth Gardner and Edward
Tyler capture the experience of each visit, and are brought
together here as a collection for the first time. Together they
encourage us to see these inspirational buildings afresh through
an architect’s eyes, and understand why it was that these
buildings made such an impression on them.
What does inspire mean?
”Inspire” was an important choice of word: the participants
were not asked to pick their favourite building, or to attempt to
select a “best” building – indeed sometimes difficult and flawed
buildings are more inspiring than perfect ones. To inspire
means to fill someone with the urge or ability to do or feel
something, especially to do something creative. Some
something, especially to do something creative. Some
participants describe their choices as “profoundly moving” or
feeling “like coming home” – the sort of analogies we draw
when talking about finding a human soul mate. Although they
could have taken Building Design to gothic cathedrals or
baroque palaces, the majority looked back no further than the
beginning of the last century, and picked C20 buildings. The
architecture of the C20, and modernism in particular, seems to
be what excites today’s architects most.
First encounters
What is the first building you can remember being in? Many of
our earliest memories are of places and the emotions they
provoked. I’m struck by the fact that many of the architects
here choose buildings they have known for an extremely long
time and, not surprisingly, many initially encountered the
buildings they selected in architectural books and magazines,
and first visited them themselves as students, sometimes
returning again and again over subsequent years. But some go
even further back. James Soane picks the Liverpool Playhouse
Extension; not a very famous building, but one to which he
feels an intensely autobiographical relationship. Not only was it
“conceived” in the same year as he was, but his father was its
engineer, and had a picture of it over his desk. James recalls
how “it entered into my consciousness before I even knew what
architecture was” and “made me aware of modern architecture
before I knew anything about it”.
Another native Liverpudlian, Paul Monaghan, picks Liverpool’s
Roman Catholic Cathedral, “Paddy’s Wigwam”– a building he
admires because it is “really loved by the public”, and is where
his whole school went for services. Niall McLaughlin chooses
“the building that made me want to be an architect”, ABK’s
Trinity College Dublin Library, and he recounts how he was all
set to study English at university until he looked carefully at this
building, and its “extraordinary vividness” had such an impact
on him that he changed to study architecture.
Many architects are enthusiastic travellers, and young architects
Many architects are enthusiastic travellers, and young architects
often take work abroad, sometimes for their “year out” – the
year (or more) spent working in architects’ offices between
undergraduate and post graduate study – architectural
education is a long haul. Many of the buildings selected here
were first seen at this point, and some of our architects had
personal encounters with their heroes. Edward Jones first went
to Eliel Saarinen’s Cranbrook campus to take life-drawing
classes when he was working for Eliel’s son Eero for a summer
– that must have led to some interesting conversations. Chris
Williamson had a spell working in New York, and then headed
west to California where in 1980 he could wander into the
garden of the Eames House and find Ray Eames still living and
working there. Some of the first encounters were casual or even
illicit (there’s some squeezing though hoardings, and climbing
over locked gates recalled here). But some architects had very
formal introductions: Michál Cohen went to the newly
completed Hellerup School on a British Council study trip and
was shown round by the head teacher. Some architects went
alone, some with their colleagues, some added on a visit as a
treat after teaching in a new city, or visiting a site for a
forthcoming project. I suspect the itineraries of some family
holidays were tweaked to take in a special place, somewhere
long lodged in the subconscious or freshly spotted in a journal.
Revisiting
All these circumstances and more impact on how a place affects
us, and going back with Pamela and a photographer specifically
for this project was always going to be a different experience.
Many participants reflect on these differences, and how they
and the places have changed. Some first visits were made when
buildings were brand new architecture, some have now shifted
status to be regarded as historic buildings. Sometimes the
original use has weathered this change; sometimes buildings
now have a very different role. There are buildings that have
decayed while others have been spruced up and restored. Some
architects are uneasy about over-restoration, some would love
to get the job of sweeping away disfiguring accretions, or
sorting out those little bits that in their opinion never worked in
the first place. Perhaps most surprisingly Jon Buck and Dominic
Cullinan chose somewhere they had never actually been before,
and made their first ever trip to Leicester Engineering Building.
Might it have inspired them differently if they had actually
visited earlier?
How do buildings inspire architects?
The hardest question these encounters raise is exactly how
these buildings have inspired the architects who have selected
them. Some of them talk directly about this: Sean Griffiths is
provocatively flippant when he tells us that “FAT has nicked
many ideas [from Loos’ American Bar]”. Jonathan Ellis-Miller is
now amused at “how blindingly obvious” the influence of
Hopkins has been on his firm’s work “in terms of plan, aesthetic
and organisation of space.” There is a bit a self-deprecation
there, but also an innate self confidence that each has added
something extra and created something new. In contrast, Tony
Fretton is adamant that he can’t see any Asplund influences in
his own work. And, of course, architects and critics can have
different interpretations of what is going on. Sometimes we
remain so close to something we have created ourselves that
we can’t see it remotely objectively.
Building an inner library
The late Jonathan Woolf went to see the Krefeld Villas to study
brickwork for a commission where he chose to use brick for the
first time, but few of these buildings have been so consciously
picked out for individual project research. I like Tim Ronalds’
reflection that he returns to Gothenburg Law Courts “not so
much to copy ideas or forms directly, rather to recharge my
aspirations”. Others talk of a specific buildings as a
“touchstone”, “a reference”, “a pin-up for us” or “as a starting
point”. “Borrowings”, of whatever form, may be recognised and
acknowledged at the time, or only realised much later. Biba
acknowledged at the time, or only realised much later. Biba
Dow says she can only now “see subliminal analogies” between
her choice of inspirational building and the practice’s own work.
Marie-José van Hee talks about how a building “goes right into
your inner map, your personal library, and you never know
when and how it will come out again until it does.”
Working as part of a team, architects, generally unfairly, get a
reputation for arrogance. Here they reveal both longings and
vulnerability. Sole practitioner Niall McLaughlin, reflecting on
ABK, the architects of his chosen building, envies the
camaraderie of having soul mates to work with, and rather than
selecting buildings where a single architect is seen as a lone
creative genius. Many participants choose buildings which
exemplify the importance of a good working relationship with an
inspiring client – sometimes with a bit of wistful envy!
Confounding expectations
What I particularly like about all the stories told here is that
they make the point that actually visiting a building is a very
different experience to reading about it, seeing photos, or even
watching a film or digital modelling. Sometimes a visit
confounds our expectations. I, too, have found that a building I
thought I knew well from photos was in a totally different
location to the one I was expecting, or unexpectedly “dinky” or
“something you can cuddle rather than something that
overawes you” as Cullinan and Buck say of the Leicester
Engineering Building. Visiting a building allows you to soak up
the atmosphere of a place, the sounds and shadows, the feel of
rough board-marked concrete, the breeze from a half open
window, the reflections on the ceiling from the pool outside. By
visiting you can observe the patterns people make as they use
the space, where they like to sit, how they work out where to
go, how the building makes them behave and feel. It’s because
this can never be fully captured nor replicated that C20 Society
campaigns to keep real, actual buildings on the sites where they
were constructed. It’s also why we like to take people to see
buildings for real too. Like the architects here, some of our
