The Critics The Critics


book MacCormac: a logical narrative


Richard MacCormac weathered the storms of post-modernism and helped to re-establish trust in architects and their intentions, writes Alan Powers


Building Ideas: MJP Architects with essays and speculations by Richard MacCormac, Rightangle Publishing, November 2010, £29.95


Some architects do an oeuvre book every decade, or more often. Richard MacCormac has waited, and to good effect. Building Ideas is no promotional coffee-table volume, despite a good ration of glamorous photography, but a thoughtful review of 40 years of work, and still going strong. After four introductory texts, each thematic section is introduced by a short specialist essay. Within the celebratory tone required for such operations, these writings are full of insight about things beyond the


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immediate subject. Te bulk of the text is by Nicola Jackson, formerly of World Architecture, who does an excellent job. Born in 1938, MacCormac comes


from the generation required to question modernism. While his long-lasting partners are duly acknowledged, he is really the subject. His own educational experience, described in the book in a piece reprinted from Arena in 1967, contrasted the formalist aestheticism of Cambridge with the mechanistic


alternative of the Bartlett. He tended to the former, and, as things turned out, backed the right horse, since the power of image and narrative has supported his abilities in logical planning and problem solving and put him in a mainstream position during the past three decades. MacCormac’s career is almost a


parable for the whole drift of architecture since 1970. One is tempted to call him a post-modernist, had that term not been ‘wrecked’ as he puts it. We need another word for >>


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