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.