Description
By Peter Beardsell, Fenella Collingridge, Mark Dorrian, Crispin Kelly, Matthew Ritchie & Peter Salter
Peter Salter is an architect and teacher whose work has influenced several generations of students. The culmination of ten years of planning, Walmer Yard, in Notting Hill, is his first residential project in the UK and one of only a small number of buildings he has completed worldwide. 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 that is half formal, half familiar, interdependent, yet solitary. Similarly, the relationships between the core team members are more nuanced than in most architectural projects, since they all met at the Architectural Association in Peter’s unit, where Crispin Kelly (the client) and Fenella Collingridge (Peter’s current collaborator) were student contemporaries. This book documents the evolution of the project through the medium of Peter Salter’s pen-and-ink drawings and Hélène Binet’s remarkable photographs.
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.
