Hugh Pearman

Jan 29, 2024 | ribaj.com | Hugh Pearman

I first encountered the remains of Aqueduct Cottage in 2014. The rocky wooded hillside it stood against was engulfing it. Its roof and gable-end chimneys had long gone, along with its windows and door. Cracks ran across its surviving stonework. Ferns grew in the soil and rubble inside. In summer it was all but invisible among the trees; in winter it appeared like a ghost.

Jan 8, 2024 | ribaj.com | Hugh Pearman

There’s a lot to be said for the conventional small terraced house, and in layout terms this one – a self-build project in Peckham, south London, by architects Surman Weston for themselves – deliberately learns from domestic tradition. Living room and kitchen/diner downstairs (with toilet under the stairs), three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, fenced planted yards front and back. But there’s rather more to it than this, as you might guess from its appearance.

Nov 27, 2023 | ribaj.com | Hugh Pearman

The architect’s modern addition for the 400-year-old Oxford college concludes a decade-long project of restoration and renewal‘Meet the ancestors!’ says Sandy Wright, holding out a lump of rock. It’s a stone sample, rich in fossils, of the type selected for the replacement cloister columns of the grade I listed Canterbury Quad at St John’s College Oxford. The originals, getting on for 400 years old, were cracking and failing.

Nov 20, 2023 | ribaj.com | Hugh Pearman

Hugh Pearman reviews Humanise and No Quarter – two new publications by very different designers – and plumps for the personal over the polemicalOne of these books is by a noted designer who does buildings and one is by a noted architect. The first, ‘Humanise’ by Thomas Heatherwick, is nearly 500 pages long and is a hugely successful, massively publicised marketing exercise for himself and his studio.

Nov 1, 2023 | ribaj.com | Hugh Pearman

Go to the district in Stratford, east London, branded as East Bank, and you are in the world of large discrete objects set among waterways and railway lines. To the 2012 remnants of the cut-down former Olympic Stadium (now West Ham FC), swoopy aquatics centre and the fading red steel tubing of the ‘Orbit’ sculpture/observation tower, you can now add a new university campus. This, at the southern end of what was the Olympic park, is the chosen expansion zone of University College London.