Architecture News & Views Kevin McCloud On Architecture

Date Published:

26/06/2008

The neo-classicist architect Robert Adam has said that contemporary design and style is something people don't want in their homes and which they're only prepared to countenance in their public buildings.

Well, in some ways I agree. Really fresh, hard-walled Modernism can be hard to live with. But increasingly it's also hard to find because it's being replaced - by a new style that fuses the structural approach of Modernism with a softer, organic, more humane sensibility that produces architecture that can be delightful, richly textured and poetic. I call it Lyricism.

And at HAB we think the values of Lyricism are just the kind of things we want to see and feel in the houses we build. And we've found it in the work of the firms we're working with: in the work of David Chipperfield (who had two projects shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize 2007), the award-winning DSDHA and our third practice, Wright and Wright.

We want homes that are designed around the people that use them, that offer flexibility and great ergonomics, that are light and seem spacious, that are a joy to live in and behold. And we want homes that look like they belong where they are: that are designed in a modern idiom but which fit their context and landscape and local culture. We're certainly not into 'look at me' architecture. More 'look at me and this place and our surroundings'.

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