Keep up appearances

摘要

Quinlan Terry may be best known as the architect of hand-crafted town and country houses - he has recently completed the last of six extraordinary villas on the edge of Regent's Park, a project that extends back into the 1980s - but he is no stranger to the world of office development. Twenty years ago, he was responsible for a six-storey commercial block at Dufour's Place in London's Soho. The far larger mixed-use development (apartments, offices, shops and restaurants) at Richmond Riverside followed in 1984-87. Coinciding as it did with the high point of the Prince of Wales' architectural- campaigning, the scheme was controversial, being variously represented as a restatement of civilised architectural and urban values or part of a conspiracy to destroy modern architecture. Terry saw commercial work as 'an opportunity and a challenge today to approach each new problem from old principles rather than from a childish desire to produce an elevation hitherto unknown'. He has no time for the Modernist tradition, of course, but he is essentially a pragmatic architect who is less concerned with remaking society than responding to a client's brief. For Haslemere Estates, the client at Richmond, his work turned out to be a sound investment (though the development is now so popular than any future attempt to redevelop the site would surely be doomed to failure).