Building on the Past

What is our relationship to history, craft, the idea of the handmade and to modernity, science and the future? Thoughts change: perhaps we live in an ever-revolving pendulum that swings between the ‘white heat’ of Harold Wilson's Sixties' technological revolution, the Nineties' Cool Britannia and a more nostalgic Britain, one that at worst can be fearful of change and the future. Too often the bold promises offered by science fail, in reality, to reach their potential; but the tweedy dreams of the historicists can feel like a journey down a quiet cul-de-sac, a dead-end eddy in the river of time. It is a dichotomy as old as time itself – the yearnings of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites versus the huge industrial expansion of Victorian England; or further back still to the Arcadian dreams of the Elizabethans, harking to a golden age (that surely never was) in contrast to the revolutionary modernity ushered in by the Reformation and the printing press – the decline of faith in the 1,000-year-old traditions of medieval Europe.

As a classical designer, both of buildings and several new towns in England and Scotland, and of interiors, I have never been fearful of drawing inspiration from the past. In fact, I will cheerfully admit to going a stage further – I’m an unashamed architectural copyist, drawing happily from the deep and rich well of inspiration of hundreds of years of history, culture and tradition. Whenever, in the studio, we are trying to solve a problem – how to detail a piece of joinery, proportion a column or find the perfect width of a street or dimension of a square – I find the easiest and quickest way to the most elegant solution is to see how people answered those questions in the past; very often, people who had more time than us to think, design and make things, slowly, crafted by hand. At the new town of Tornagrain, 5,000 houses to the east of Inverness, which we are designing for the Earl of Moray’s Estate, we spend a huge amount of time in local towns and villages, absorbing the detail and character of the local highland vernacular. Similarly, in Truro, for the Duchy of Cornwall, we designed a new Royal Crescent facing east over beautiful distant views to the countryside beyond, and we spent much time studying the dimensions, curve and orientation of 18th- and early-19th century examples. The façades of those houses were a copy of a carefully measured drawing of John Nash’s beautiful terrace opposite the British Museum, his first building in London.

None of this is to say that we need turn our back on the huge advantages of science and technology, but increasingly I’m of the view that science without an understanding of history, or of history without an understanding of the infinite possibilities of technological solutions, are both empty vessels – incapable of reaching their fullest potential. In so many fields on the periphery of our work, from regenerative agriculture to water management to ecological building technology, we learn that the wisdom of ancient ways of doing things teaches us powerful lessons today. Evolution not revolution, a harmonic balance of history and the new, an understanding of how things are made and of a sense of the timeless; these are my watchwords today in everything we do.

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Lead image of Tornagrain by Ben Pentreath