Aldington at Bledlow

That's not Peter Aldington, the creative force within Aldington Craig and Collinge, but me standing in-front of the trike and Adlington's award winning housing at Lyde End in Bledlow of 1977. It could have been Peter, in some parallel dimension, for he also sports quite a beard, and certainly in terms of empathy, there is so much for me to admire here. I wish I had but a small percentage of his talent. As it was, when I met him long ago, he admired my sketchbooks, but it's in the marshalling of physical building material that Aldington should be admired; in the detail certainly, and in the care of conception. This is a masterful arrangement of wall, roof, and infill panel, reminding me of the rigorous work of Ted Cullinan when in California (Marvin House,1960, below), but knitted more agriculturally in to the Chiltern village setting. It even manages, in it's quality, to doff it's cap to lord, master and enlightened patron Lord Charrington across the road, who undoubtedly recognised quality when he saw it (he died this week) reminding us of some old school values sadly disappearing.

It is tempting to say Aldington created a repertoire of building details from first principles (and I learnt a few of these when working for Donald Wilson as he set about fashioning doors and windows for some cottages in Dorset in 1980) but they are unusual. To set plate glass directly in to a brick wall with the aid of not much more than craftsmanship and mastic is unconventional, so is letting glass slip down to eliminate the cill (a Wilson trick) and you might expect a high risk of failure. However, returning to Lyde End after forty years the place looks as fresh as a daisy; all that bespoke stuff worked!

In a world now obsessed by smooth, floating singularity, transfixed by the malleable in all senses, this is a refreshing return to the world of articulation part from part. Each element is not expected to do everything, but to play it's part and find expression in doing so. A concrete beam slips six inches further out than where it might stop, a window detail within clapboarding is different to that within masonry. Each material either goes around a corner or finds itself butted and secured against something else. Further, nobody has forgotten the garden and the husbandry that mirrors that of the building art, they compliment each other; after all, a rose is not a tulip.