Richard Bryant/Arcaid

I have recently become a trustee of the Turn End Trust, an organisation which conserves, protects and maintains one of three Grade II listed houses designed and built in the 1960’s by the architect Peter Aldington, in the Buckinghamshire village of Haddenham.

Alongside the preservation of the house and garden, the trust has two other clear objectives which are the advancement of education and scholarship in the art of building and garden design and the promotion of public knowledge and understanding of architecture, planning, landscape architecture and allied subjects.
Architects and designers need to understand the importance of materiality, craftsmanship and landscape design, the relationship of inside and outside spaces and how they integrate, before moving onto the wider ideas.

Having become immersed in this world, and reconnected with Peter Adlington, who still lives in the house, and with whom I worked as a young architect, I have come to reflect on why there is such a blandness in much contemporary architecture. It seems modern architecture has forgotten how to look backwards in order to look forward.

I have noticed this more profoundly during the past decade as an abundance of digital image libraries, news sites and social media have become readily available. Designers can access the newest projects, the most transient trends, and topical commentary, while historical references, great modernist architecture of the 20th Century, gets buried and forgotten at the bottom of a news feed. We are no longer looking closely enough at what has gone before as the accessibility of the contemporary dominates our search engines. And this makes for superficial thinking.

As I have written before I am firm believer in shifting our emphasis as architects away from traditional ground of ‘here’s a building we designed’ to the more experiential focussed and user centred approach thus broadening what we do and ensuring our thinking and designing is relevant to a very complex modern world. However I can see and believe that both in fact are incredibly important and in order to do the latter brilliantly you have to be able to do the former.

Architects and designers need to understand the importance of materiality, craftsmanship and landscape design, the relationship of inside and outside spaces and how they integrate, before moving onto the wider ideas. And it is modernist buildings, such as Turn End, that represent - in such an unexpected setting - the manifestation and realisation of these ideas.  

The clever way in which Turn End represents a carefully scaled response to locality and site, simplicity and directness of building, and ingenuity of planning, conceived as a series of walled enclosures, some open to the sky, others roofed, highlights that there is nothing else like Aldington's houses and garden at Haddenham in post-war British architecture.

These buildings remain an object lesson for all architects and designers.

They show how the most modest use of materials such as timber, concrete block and glass can create characterful architecture. How English traditions of picturesque and vernacular design and construction can fuse with key tenets of modernism to make an architecture very much of its place. And they demonstrate a magical union between interior and exterior, between house and garden creating a series of secret spaces each carefully composed to take advantage of topography, shading and orientation with plant species chosen to respond to their locations.

These buildings remain an object lesson for all architects and designers.

Turn End has always been celebrated as a rare British representative amongst the best of European housing design and has welcomed visitors from all over the world.  It has provided teaching material for students of architecture and landscape design, been written about nationally and internationally and photographed widely.

And so when searching for inspiration, references and precedents, alongside the easily accessible best work of our contemporaries, we must remember to look back in time, to the work of Alvar Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Khan, Le Corbusier, Gropius, the list goes on, and understand, respect and consider their timeless achievements.