In the upper picture, my mother’s beautiful pots are arranged in ‘villages’ on the kitchen counter.
Reflection and transparency: my mother’s mirrored dressing table in the bedroom, with the door open through to the kitchen and living room beyond.
My mother in the study at Parkside.
Travelling round the USA and Mexico, I had seen the bright colours of California, of the Case Study Houses. I had seen how colour was used in industrial architecture, to indicate function, distinguish components, or signal hazards. It seemed natural to bring all this back to London, as an additional layer of meaning – a different way of making buildings legible and transparent in their functions – but also as a form of play, a way of lightening and clarifying the formalism of imposing structures. Ancient buildings – from the Acropolis to medieval cathedrals – were much more colourful than their bleached stone tells us today. Using modern industrial components frees you to experiment with colour too: plastics are whatever colour you choose to make them. I sympathise with Gropius who, when asked his favourite colour, replied, ‘All of them!’ People are frightened about choosing the ‘right’ ones, but I don’t worry about following rules. Green can go with red or pink; if a colour is beautiful, it will go with another beautiful colour.
Parkside originally included a consulting room for my father to continue medicine, and the separate lodge included a carport, and a studio for my mother’s pottery. The focal point of the house was an open-plan kitchen. Cooking and entertaining had always been the heart of our family life and bringing the kitchen into the living space made cooking a social activity, not a segregated chore. Over the years, my mother cooked for so many of my friends, and instilled a love of Italian food not only in Ruthie, who went on to create the River Café with Rose Gray, but in Georgie and Su too, and my sons, who are all really good cooks.
On the other side of the kitchen counter, the house made room for the beautiful 1930s modern furniture that my cousin Ernesto had created in Italy as a wedding present for my parents. My mother’s pottery was on shelves, and walls were hung with paintings by Ben Nicholson and Patrick Heron – and a prized Picasso print.
Over time Parkside has adapted and evolved: the carport and pottery became a flat for my brother Peter, then for John Young, then the design studio of my son Ab, who moved into the house when my mother died. When Ab moved out, we gifted Parkside to Harvard, as a residential centre for their Graduate School of Design, led by Mohsen Mostafavi. Each year, six research fellows will live in the house, which has been reconfigured by Philip Gumuchdjian, who co-wrote Cities for a Small Planet with me when he was working at RRP, pursuing research into urban development, and it will also host lectures and other events. It has changed with the times, accommodating different needs and uses rather than constraining them, reflecting the architectural philosophy later summarised as ‘Long life, loose fit, low energy’.
The Limits of Traditional Technique – Creek Vean and Murray Mews
Su and I began work on Parkside in 1968. For five years, first with Norman and Wendy Foster, and then with John Young and Laurie Abbott, we had been working towards a new architectural language, feeling our way along a path without knowing clearly what the destination would be.
Norman Foster and Wendy Cheesman, who married in 1964, at Team 4’s offices.
When we returned from the USA in 1963, Norman, Su and I had set up Team 4 with my ex-girlfriend Georgie Cheesman, and her sister Wendy. At first, we worked out of Wendy’s bedroom in a two-room flat in Belsize Park. Frank Peacock, who had studied with me at the AA (literally alongside me, as our surnames made us neighbours in every class), and was a brilliant technician and draughtsman, built a box to put over Wendy’s bed, so that we could use it as workspace during the day. When clients visited, friends would be roped in to pose as architects, to make Team 4 look like a larger concern than it was.
As neither Norman nor I had completed our training, we were not entitled to call ourselves architects. Georgie had qualified and gave Team 4 some legitimacy, but she quickly saw that Norman and I were going to be impossible to work with, so moved on. The core of Team 4 was Norman and Wendy (who fell in love with each other and married), and Su and me. Norman and I did manage to complete our registration, but only after being summoned before the Architects Registration Council for practising without a licence.
Team 4’s first commission, Creek Vean, was both Parkside’s twin and its opposite. Like Parkside, it was for our parents – in this case, Su’s, Marcus and Rene Brumwell. Like Parkside it has now been listed as Grade II*. Like Parkside it presents a deceptively blank face to the road outside. But there the similarities end.
Marcus Brumwell had asked us to look at the plans for renovating his holiday home on the banks of a Cornish creek by the Fal estuary. We soon decided, and persuaded our client, that he needed to demolish the existing house and start again. Our designs set up a dialogue between light and shadow, between the geometry of concrete blocks and soft contours of a creekside, between modern materials and sense of place.
Marcus Brumwell, my father-in-law and Team 4’s first client, with Creek Vean, completed in 1967, on the hillside behind. The double-height living space faces the Fal estuary; the lower living spaces overlook the creek.
Our final design had two axes: the living accommodation was arranged along the contours of the site. A double-height living room, dominated by a hanging Alexander Calder sculpture, and kitchen face out towards the Fal estuary; three bedrooms are angled in towards views over the creek to the hills beyond. A stepped path separates the living room and the bedrooms, bridging over a glass-roofed gallery that forms a connecting corridor and housed the Brumwells’ collection of St Ives School art. The path leads down from the road to the creek itself, where we spent many happy days sailing with Marcus and Rene – and our children and grandchildren still return there to sail every summer.
Team 4 at our Hampstead Hill Gardens office in 1963 or 1964. The way we were posing like a pop group, not an architecture practice, convinced John Young to apply for a placement with us.
The buildings hug the hillside, and have over time been softened by the vegetation that grows over and around them (the planting was designed by Michael Branch), but their form is uncompromising, and you can still see the powerful influence of the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings that we had visited while driving around the USA only months earlier. The house was designed so that it could be extended: the wall at the end of the bedrooms was intended to be a pause not a terminus, a semicolon not a full stop.
Working with Tony Hunt and Laurie Abbott, we used carefully specified concrete blocks for the main structure. But rather than letting them dictate the geometry of the building, we cut them to shape like lumps of cheese, so that they could follow our unconventionally contoured plan. We used neoprene, a type of rubber that was a new technology at that time (I think we were among the first to use it), for the joints between blocks and glazing.
At the same time as Creek Vean, we were working on three houses at Murray Mews in Camden. We were exhausted, putting in fourteen-hour days, seven days a week. It’s not a good way to work,
