Rick Mather: Urban Approaches

An American, who received his training at the University of Oregon, Mather moved to England at a time when American urban fabric was dissolving in a sea of business parks and freeways. London offered the attraction of life in a city with real metropolitan qualities and his architecture is a celebration of those older qualities; a rejection of the buildings as an isolated object. Nevertheless his buildings are all rooted in the calm purity of the vocabulary of Modernism. Working in cities as diverse as London, Hong Kong, and Montreal, Mather works both at the scale of the individual house as well as the office building or university. His domestic work is an ingenious exploration of high-density living, his restaurants are dazzling pieces of social stagecraft while his commercial projects address the issue of urbanity head on.