Published in Reminiscence, edited by Benedict Esche and Benedikt Hartl, December 2016

I grew up in Leicester where one modern building was revered above all others: Stirling and Gowan's 1963 Engineering Building. When I applied to study architecture at university, I took my sketches of the building to interviews as though they would undoubtedly explain my reasons for wanting to become a modern architect. Later on I would visit the building when seeing my parents, I took students when I became a university teacher and I went on to write about the building for a Stirling monograph. I love the Engineering Building's form, its construction, its relationship to the park that spreads out in front of it. But most of all, I love that it is undeniably fresh, inventive and playful more than forty years after it was built. 

Twenty-five years after my first Stirling sketches and my practice is working on a new quad for New College, Oxford. This led me to visit Stirling's 1971 Florey Building at Queen's College for the first time. From drawings and photographs it appeared to lack some of the grace and strong relationship to its site that the Engineering building possessed. However, in the flesh it was a revelation. The traditional quad, a unique combination of uses and form that has persisted for six hundred years, was here radically reconfigured. Raised above the ground, open to the landscape on its fourth side but otherwise more intimate than any quad before, it suggested a new set of relationships for an Oxford College. Our scheme for New College includes two three-sided quads that open onto gardens. One of the quads is more inflected outwards to the garden, the other inwards, suggesting a scale of formal to informal and convivial to contemplative. Part of the ongoing design development is to study Stirling's Florey Building in sufficient detail to measure our design decisions against a modern masterpiece. Drawing will be the primary means of continuing the dialogue with Stirling I started in Leicester.