8) Peter Smithson: Conversations with Students [electronic resource] (2005) (pp. 9-32; 72-89).

A lot can be learnt from Peter Smithson’s principles and applied to my work. He highlights the importance of learning from previous inspirational architects in a stylistic sense, with a general moral overlap and not copying their designs.

He also emphasises the importance of travelling and experiencing buildings, as architects did when the Gothic revival began, to really understand the style. With travel being so easy in this day and age, it is important that I travel as much as possible to understand different types of architecture, as seeing images and orthographic drawings does not always give a sense of scale and character. As Peter Smithson outlines, learning about the history of a place to develop my work is also very important, understanding the culture, the types of cathedrals etc should all heavily influence my work.  He also states that we should not just look at the architecture but also the building process to really understand a structure.

He goes on to talk the quality of ‘nothing’ and how architecture these days can be so cluttered and compact that we forget about ‘free’ space in which we can move around. This is something I have noticed in modern architecture, with an ever-growing population and diminishing space to build we do tend to cram as many buildings and rooms into spaces to enable maximum capacity. Perhaps my design work can try to tackle this problem and look for ways to create efficient space, with free space left over from the functionality.