- An extensive and engaging study of award-winning architect Peter Salter's first ever residential project - Features specially commissioned photographs by Hélène Binet- Book design by Archigram founder member Dennis CromptonWalmer Yard, in London, is the first residential building in Britain designed by architect Peter Salter. The culmination of ten years of planning, the project makes physical the ideas and forms that Salter has developed over the last three decades. Although modest in scale, the project is extraordinary in many ways. On an irregularly shaped site, Salter s design brings four houses into a complex relationship with each other, half-formal, half-familiar, interdependent yet solitary. Similarly, the relations among the core team who developed the design are more nuanced than in most architectural projects, since they all met at the Architectural Association in Peter Salter s unit, where Crispin Kelly (the client) and Fenella Collingridge (Peter s current collaborator) were student contemporaries. This book documents the project with Peter Salter s original pen-and-ink drawings and Hélène Binet s extraordinary photographs.
About the Author: Peter Salter began his career in the studio of Alison and Peter Smithson. In the early 1980s, he formed a partnership with Christopher Macdonald, producing a series of projects known for their highly developed and evocative drawings. Throughout the 1980s and '90s he taught at the Architectural Association as a unit master. In 1995, he became professor and head of school at the University of East London, and is now Professor of Architectural Design at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. In 2004, he won the RIBA Annie Spink Award for his outstanding contribution to architectural education, and in 2012 was elected a Hon FRIBA. In 2018, he and Fenella Collingridge exhibited 'Proposal B' at the Venice Biennale. Walmer Yard received a RIBA National Award in 2017. Fenella Collingridge was associate designer of Walmer Yard. For many years she taught architecture at the Royal College of Art. She teaches at the Architectural Association and has run research projects into the relationship between colour, volume, tone and texture in architecture. She exhibited 'Proposal B' with Peter Salter at the Venice Biennale in 2018. Crispin Kelly studied history at Oxford, before becoming a developer and qualifying as an architect. He has contributed to journals on topics ranging from art in public space to the qualities of successful suburbs. He is a past president of the Architectural Association, and currently chairs the board of trustees of the London School of Architecture, and Open City. Peter Beardsell taught at Chelsea College of Art and Design, in Interior and Spatial Design. He also taught at the Architectural Association, with Peter Salter, and at the School of Architecture at the University of East London. He is currently a visiting critic at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. Mark Dorrian holds the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh and co-directs Metis, an atelier for art, architecture and urbanism. His recent books include Seeing From Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (2013) and a volume of collected essays titled Writing On The Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation (2015). Matthew Ritchie is a visual artist whose practice includes painting, wall drawings, light boxes, sculpture, performance, virtual reality, music, text and projections. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Architecture Biennale. He is currently an Artist-in-Residence at MIT and a Mentor Professor at Columbia University. Hélène Binet is a Swiss/French photographer, currently living in London. Her work has been published in a wide range of books, and shown in numerous exhibitions. An advocate of analogue photography, she works exclusively with film. In 2019 she was awarded the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for her exceptional contribution in the field of architecture. Dennis Crompton is one of the six members of the architectural collective, Archigram, who were awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2002. For many years he taught at the Architectural Association and was responsible for the production of the AA's publications and exhibitions from 1976 to 1994 as the coordinator of the Communications Unit.