Top

During the course of the last 40 years I have maintained a small design practice. Occasionally this has been integrated with my teaching work. More often, it has not. Below, I have set out a series of categories that span my work chronologically from 1962 to the present.

Scope of work

Early Training

Postgraduate Work

Design Methods

The Berkeley Years

Sonoma Years

The New Zealand Experience

My Own Places

In addition to this history of personal design work produced over the years, my desgn theorising has also been also impliicated in my teaching. For forty years I have taught Community Design in various schools of architecture around the world.This has also been a site where my Critical Design theorising has been extended and has indeed been shaped by the students and projects with which I havce been involved. To view some of these projects in more detail click here .

Scope of Work

I have been a registered architect for 40 years. During most of that time I have also been an educator - teaching at Schools of Architecture in Britain, America and New Zealand. I have also practiced as an architect in all of these places, and have been involved in a wide range of quite different types of work:

• School Design
• Church Design
• Institutional Design
• Residential Design
• Brief Writing and Programming
• Commercial Design
• Urban Design and Revitalisation
• Campus Planning
  

Early Training

Holy Family Primary School, Rochdale

During my time at the School of Architecture, like most students, I explored the work of designers I then admired Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto etc. and emulated their conceptions in my work. These influences, combined with images and memories of my own urban industrial childhood produced a mixture of symbols and textures that I enjoyed.

Lord Wandsworth Primary School, Farnham

In my final year I became interested in design research - how people design things, the mental process of the design activity. This interest led me to complete my Final Thesis on Design Methodology.This evolved slowly into a study (in 1965) of how one might design a building entirely by computer modelling - attempting to elimminate all subjectivity from the design process. Taking principles from the discipline of Operations Research I led a team which developed a programme for optimising the three dimensional distribution of activities in non-Euclidian space based upon the most efficient movement of occupants around a building - in this case an Electrical Engineering faculty for the University of Birmingham. (below) This abstract "atomic" moidel was then rationalised down into diufferent stratifications, with the least amount of interference with the original optimisations.

Electrical Engineering Faculty - Design by Computer 1965.

Back to top

Post Graduate Work

This work led to a series of lectures beginning at the Royal Institute of British Architects and continuing around Britain at many of the Schools of Architecture of England, Scotland and Wales. Following graduation, I returned to my previous employment where I worked almost exclusively on a Catholic Church in Wolverhamption (below) It was at the time of Vatican II, and the liturgy and its space were in a state of flux. The Church of St, Michael is essentially inward-looking (and in retrospect externally uninviting - a bulwark of brick set against intrusion). Once inside, however, the concealed natural lighting and stained glass windows provided a profusion of mystical light and colour.

Design Methods

Following the construction of the Church I resigned my position, and moved to London, working in research and teaching part-time in Design Methods. My interest turned away from computers and design as my interests developed into Philosophy, Social Phenomenology and social behaviour and design form. I worked for almost two years for the department of the Environment in London, researching and developing design guidelines for Prisons (designing them with a view to cutting recidivism) and Sheltered Workshops for the Blind (to train the blind in independent mobility). This extended my interest and involvement in researching the influence of the physical envioronment on behaviour and led to a further involvement with the field of social psychology.

Sheltered Workshops for the Blind (left) with Neville Longbone and Stephen Mendes

Prison Workshops (right) 1967

For more detailed description of Blind Workshops click here

 

The path was now laid out for the next forty years. By 1967 I had accepted a position at the Portsmouth Polytechnic as a Research Fellow in Design Methods. While there I hosted and organised the Portsmouth Symposium in Design Methods in Architecture, an international landmark event in the domain of architectural education and theorising. Many of the speakers at the Symposium went on to become renowned design theorists and educators. It was a heady time! The success of this event led to an invitation to present a paper at an international Design Methods Group Conference in Boston held jointly by Harvard, MIT and the University of California. It was 1968, a momentous year. The year that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were murdered - the latter during the DMG Conference. Students were rioting in Paris, the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London was under anti-war siege and in San Francisco it was the Summer of Love. Within a year I had accepted a full-time position at the University of California Berkeley. where I remained for the next eight years.

Back to to top

The Berkeley Years

My eight years at Berkeley were shaped by the times. I became increasingly involved in the Civil Rights Movement - working for Defense Attorneys for George Jackson and the other two Soledad Brothers - and increasingly caught up in the anti-Vietnam War Movement that was sweeping through US. Campuses. Issues of student voice were becoming prominent, and I became an advocate and practitioner of student-centred education and pedagogies - which many years later would become a central topic of my PhD. Despite all of this work in politics and education I also maintained a small design practice doing mainly residential work, which moved inexorably after the 1974 oil crisis towards issues of sustainability and natural energy systems. This, mixed in the context of the Bay Areaʻs vernacular (Maybeck, Shindler and Risden, Green and Green, Julia Morgan) led me to try to integrate these technological issues with an Arts and Crafts ambiance. During this time I completed several residential projects - none of them coming to built completion. I also took an increaqsing interest in the field of Humanistic Psychology, training in Psychodrama and running workshops for my students at the University and at the American institute of Architects Annual Conference in Houston, Texas.

 

Robison House, Berkeley 1971

Sonoma Years

House Modification in Sonoma, California, for John Dankworth and Cleo Laine 1980

Other notable projects included a passive solar house outside the historic town of Calistoga for Kelly Larson and Robert Opsahl. Botgh Kelly and Robert immersed in their Norwegian ancestry, as well as being Buddhists. They loved the image of the old Nowrwegian Stave Churches, and integrated this with suggestions of Buddhist temples. The design included carefully detailed eaves to cut out the Summer and let in the Winter sun, a central flue to recirculate the hot air from the apex down into the floor slab, earth tubes to introduce cool air into the slab during the hot summer, and a natural convection system to maintain a balanced temperature. The house was suspended from massive old recycled bridge timbers. Robert built the house himself.

 

The Shea - Cloudt House,Napa, California, 1980

The New Zealand Experience

Occasionally I worked with developers on small housing developments. One of these, the Barrance project in Auckland's Freemans Bay continued my interest in ecclectic design carried over from my California days, with some New Zealand influences beginning to emerge. The design was for three townhouses nestled down a steep bush North-facing gully. (below) The development was forestalled by the Crash of 87.

Barrance Development, Freemans Bay, 1987.

During the boom days of the 1980s I was increasingly involved with developments of one kind or another. One which did manage to be finished before the crash involved three townhouses on Remuera's Victoria Avenue. (below).

During those extraordinary years leading up to the Crash, I was also involved as consultant on a variety of major and very large development projects. Two of these - the successful Mace Development design for Princes Wharf on the Auckland (below) and the competition design for Devonport Wharf for Wilkins and Davies stemmed from my Viaduct basin analysis for the Auckland Civic Trust of which i was then a Board member.

Princes Wharf, Auckland 1986

 

The Mace Development proposal was never built despite winning the design competition. The Stock Market crash of 1987 intervened and the proposal fell through. Similarly, The Devonport Warf proposal by Wilkins and Davies (below) was also stymied.

 

Devonport Wharf Design 1987

Back to top

When completed, this retreat wiill have accommodation for both individuals and groups for workshops and retreat activities. The first phase Studio is almost complete. The Retreat its is situated on the beautiful Lake Ohakuri with commanding views of a private inlet. It is intended that it will become a demonstration example of sustainable building and living, as well as a centre for Eco Tourism and Educational Programmes.

The Retreat will be available for bookings in early 2008, and will provide a supportive, completely private and secluded environment for learning and relaxing with a range of recreational activities to sustain the programmes offered.

Back to the top