Mary Blume International Herald Tribune
Saturday, July 28, 2001

LONDON Not yet a household name but already an icon, Rick Mather is known in design magazines for such details as polished steel handrails, sinusoidal glass walls and circular skylights, and in the daily press as the Master Planner of large scale redos of fatigued or frankly hideous urban sites.
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A tall and amiably wry Oregonian whose West Coast cool has proved more than a match for English froideur, Mather gives a typically understated definition of master planning while discussing a current project for Stowe School. "It's sort of knitting without a pattern, so we're creating a pattern and they're reknitting parts of it."
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When Mather was unanimously chosen over 70 international architects, including Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas, to make the master plan for London's South Bank arts complex in 1999, there was a collective sigh of relief. "Londoners can, at last, have the impression that something is being done to address the problem of the South Bank and Mather's trademark rational, cool, modern approach seems the perfect antidote to the centre's drab squalor," said The Financial Times.
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The South Bank, Europe's largest arts complex and twice the size of Lincoln Center, includes the Royal Festival Hall, built in 1951, and two major examples of 1960s concrete brutalism, the Hayward Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall: for all its interior riches, an area only muggers could enjoy and where just finding an entrance door is a feat. The existing buildings will not be razed since Mather is both a respecter of history and a realist. New work, from which Mather's practice is excluded, will be chosen by competition. (The National Theatre, while abutting the master plan, is not included in it.)
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His plan, which is intricate, emphasizes strategies for brightening the South Bank at street level: For some reason its major walkways are now above the street. "I think streets are wonderful things, the more lively and intense they are the better." The aim of his plan, Mather says, is to urbanize the South Bank: Just because a place is in the city this does not automatically make it part of the city. In the past year the depressed South Bank area has been dramatically revived by the new Tate Modern at one end and the world's largest Ferris wheel at the other. When completed, it will, Mather says, be what it should be, the center of London. "It couldn't be more central and more important."
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Or more of a headache. It had already defeated the post-modernist Terry Farrell and Richard Rogers, whose plan was to enclose the whole mess in wavy glass. "Some people said what a fabulous commission, others said it's a poisoned chalice," Mather said. "My theory is the person who loses gives up last and we're not about to give up."
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The South Bank could be completed in two or three years, but Mather, a forward planner, says that if funds from public, private and lottery sources shrink the project could be realized incrementally, piece by piece.
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Mather's drawing board is full of current projects, including a master plan for Oxford's Ashmolean Museum and redoing the Lyric Hammersmith theater, the University of Southampton and, as of this month, the University of Lincoln. He is a finalist for what would be his first U.S. commission, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, to be decided in the coming weeks, and, having reworked the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, is now master-planning the whole site, wending his slide rule through existing masterpieces by Wren, Inigo Jones and Hawksmoor.
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Most recently he has won praise for updating Sir John Soane's lovely Dulwich Picture Gallery, built in 1811, and the Wallace Collection in London. These are what is known as sensitive sites, which appeals to Mather, who is more responsive than merely respectful. "Yes," he said, "being complementary rather than imitation."
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Even for someone whose first trip to Europe as a student in 1959 included studying stave churches and the medieval origins of Oregon's timber vernacular, the attractions of urban architecture are not all that strange, Oregon having been one of the first states in the 1960s to pioneer urban renewal.
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Mather's first urban project was redoing a house for his parents in Washington, where his father, an electrical engineer, had been summoned by the Kennedy administration to plan a never-realized national high-voltage power grid. "I got them to live in the center of Washington rather than a suburb and they loved it."
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One reason he moved to London in 1963 was that he likes working in a strong context. This also makes the fact that so much of his work is rethinking and redesigning existing structures totally congenial. "It's something a lot of people aren't interested in, they don't think there's any chance to do good architecture," he said. "You have a historical reference there, and yet I think we've shown that you don't have to do a pastiche."
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His favored material is glass, and he made an extension in Hampstead for an 18th century cottage that was all glass, including the beams, persuading local authorities that this was the best means of letting the identity of the original structure come through.
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He is also expert at energy conservation, having built a house that has no central heating for his sister in northern Canada, where temperatures often drop to 40 below.
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"That's done by energy conservation rather than solar power. People think solar power's the answer. It isn't. We waste a lot of energy, that's what you want to attack rather than keep the waste and have solar power to cover the waste. You design the problem out rather than applying therapy to the problem."
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More dramatically, for his first Chinese restaurant he used heat from the kitchen's woks to create the restaurant's hot water supply. His most recent restaurant is an elegant structure of glass, steel, wood and chrome in Menton on the French Riviera - "not your usual Provencal restaurant with red checked tablecloths" -that opened last month to attract the fashionable overflow from nearby Monte Carlo.
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When he first came to London, Mather immediately found a job with the architectural practice of his choice. A year and a half later he enrolled in London's excellent Architectural Association to study urban design, and after opening his own practice in 1973 he was given the coveted if risky job of redoing the school's headquarters in three Georgian townhouses. From an outsider he became a colleague.
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Mather has taught at the AA (as well as at Harvard) and is a prominent figure in the Royal Institute of British Architects and a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as the winner of many awards (an average of more than two a year for the past five years). The architecture critic Hugh Pearman calls Mather an architect's architect and a Londoner par excellence.
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"I think a foreigner appreciates a city more than somebody who grew up there," Mather said. "I came over here very keen on cities, having grown up in a suburb. I think also if you're a foreigner that gives you license. If you make a mistake they can just put it down to doing things differently in another place."

Mary Blume
28-29 July 2001