‘Our beginning was a worm,” says John Outram. “It had light-sensitive cells at one end that later turned into eyes.” He is standing in the bathroom at the top of his house in London’s Connaught Square, explaining the symbolism of the patterns that line the walls of his shower.
Three white worms wiggle their way across a background of blue mosaic tiles at the base of the cubicle, while a black I-shape floats against a band of red tiles above, denoting “the emergence of the ego”. A third yellow band at the top marks the realm of light, where the figure of “thought” appears between two triangles, signifying the parted halves of the “heap of history”. It’s a lot to digest before breakfast – and we haven’t even got on to the symbolic ceiling (the “raft of reason”) or the hexagonal serpent-skin floor tiles.
“I stand here every morning to do my exercises,” says Outram, breaking into an infectious giggle. “A good dose of metaphysics sets one up for the day.”
The eccentric architect has reason to be cheerful. At the age of 87, he is enjoying an unexpected wave of popularity. Having been stamped with the label of postmodernism – out of favour since the 1990s, when his work was described as “architectural terrorism” – he has been rediscovered by a new generation, thirsty for colour, pattern, ornament and fun.
The last few years have seen several of his buildings listed, from the Isle of Dogs pumping station, that cartoonish temple to summer storms, to an opulent country house in Sussex built for the Tetra Pak billionaires Hans and Märit Rausing. Illustrations of Outram’s buildings can now be found emblazoned on T-shirts and mugs, while he has a growing following on Instagram, which he joined during lockdown, where he expounds his esoteric theories to a rapt audience. And now, for the first time, the full breadth of his maverick output has been brought together in a monograph. So how does it feel to be recognised so late in life, after years in the wilderness?
“I call it being dug up,” he says with a chortle. “Disinterred, as it were. It’s quite entertaining.”
As Geraint Franklin, the book’s author, observes, the English have never quite known what to do with Outram. His buildings are hi-tech, neoclassical and postmodern all at once, yet they fit neatly into none of these categories. His chubby columns house sophisticated mechanical systems for ventilation, wiring and drainage, while simultaneously alluding to ancient mythologies in their richly layered ornament.
A huge jet engine fan in the pediment of the pumping station helps to cool the machinery inside, while also standing as the symbolic source of the “river of somatic time”. A pyramidal glass fireplace in the Egyptian-themed Sphinx Hill house in Oxfordshire summons momentous Pharaonic allusions, while cleverly sucking smoke beneath the floor to a hidden flue.
In Outram’s world, embracing technology and modernity did not preclude the presence of poetry and history. While others of his generation, like Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Michael Hopkins, stripped their structures back, Outram piled it all on, mining inspiration from Sumerian, Egyptian, Chinese and Mayan cultures with magpie glee. While Rogers thought that “buildings of the future will be more like robots than temples”, Outram saw they could be both.
But this wasn’t pomo, in his eyes at least. “I’ve always thought of myself as a modernist,” he says, “who rejected the injunction to be illiterate.” Ornament was a crime for most of his peers, but he revelled in architecture’s ability to tell stories, densely “scripting” his buildings’ surfaces with meaning – even if it was in a language that only he himself could understand.
Born in Malaysia, where his army officer father was stationed, Outram’s outsider status owes something to his upbringing. His childhood saw spells in Burma and India, before he arrived at prep school in England at the age of 11, feeling like “a refugee from the British empire.” His early exposure to the vivid sights and sounds of South Asian cities informed his impression of the classical world, as being “much more like India than like the British Museum. Very noisy, very smelly, very colourful.”
Step inside his Judge Business School in Cambridge, or Duncan Hall at Rice University, Houston, and you get a sense of what the dazzlingly painted Parthenon might have felt like. Outram’s interiors explode in a polychromatic riot, their striped columns supporting coloured entablatures, beneath vaulted ceilings that writhe with decoration. There are metaphorical rivers and symbolic rafts aplenty, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t know the code. “I put it all in,” Outram once said, “and you can do what you like with it.”
The storyteller-architect would probably have been a writer if it wasn’t for his father, who forbade him from taking English at A-level. He insisted on physics and geography instead, both of which Outram failed. After his national service as a pilot, he entered London’s Regent Street Polytechnic in 1955, where he gained a technical grounding in architecture and the building trades, instilling a practical attitude he retained his entire career, that “the common way to build is likely to be the best way to build”.
Unlike his hi-tech peers, his projects rarely exceeded the capabilities of the average builder. “The problem with hi-tech is that it’s very expensive, and the tech isn’t very high,” he says. “I’d been a pilot, so I knew what real hi-tech was – and it wasn’t suitable for architecture.” He completed his studies at the Architectural Association, winning his place with a camp rebuff to the macho new brutalism, in vogue at the time. Responding to a brief for a writing shed for a playwright, Outram designed an organic pod with a drawstring entrance to a fur-lined interior.
It was a disarming use of unexpected materials that would become characteristic of his work. As Franklin writes, base materials are subject to an almost alchemical transformation in Outram’s hands. Humdrum concrete – which he once described as a “funereal porridge of muddy ashes” – could be transformed into “blitzcrete” with fragments of coloured brick, ground and polished to an edible nougat finish. It debuted at his New House for the Rausings in Wadhurst, Sussex, in 1986, where five types of crushed brick swirl across the facade like confetti in the wind.
To commemorate the millennium, Outram was invited back to Wadhurst to add an outdoor dining veranda, for which he concocted his most elaborate column design yet. “It’s an ontogeny in architectural form,” he says, explaining how the design embodies the development of an organism from its earliest stages of life, just like his shower tiles. Raised on four stout legs, a base of blue concrete contains black marble “eggs”, from which an octagonal lotus of green blitzcrete emerges, marking “the amphibious stage”.
It supports a ring of 12 rods, patterned with swirling bands of blue and white concrete, signifying the first cry of life, topped with a cylinder of translucent crystal and a capital of glossy black concrete – the pinnacle of “thought”. The columns look like candy-cane rockets, ready to blast the Rausings off to a parallel sugar-coated dimension.
Conjuring bespoke fantasies for wealthy families and well-heeled universities was one thing, but Outram’s encounters with more commercial clients didn’t always bear fruit. One illuminating section in the book is devoted to his unrealised scheme for office developer Stuart Lipton in the City of London, which would have seen a palatial facade encrusted with glazed turquoise tiles, lacquered blue and red concrete cylinders, and friezes of cast glass, supported on columns of indigo blue, green granite and brick-red concrete.
But the lettable floor area wasn’t big enough to pay for such a majestic envelope, so it was canned. Some saw his design as a Trojan horse to help secure permission for the wider Ludgate scheme – “a little ‘engine’ of a building,” Outram remarked, “that would tow the rent-rich freight cars through to planning permission”.
His most fitting unrealised commission was for Battersea Power Station, which he was hired to transform into a wonderland of “shoppertainment” by Hong Kong developer Victor Hwang. “We planned to have holographic races around the ceiling,” Outram recalls, “and gigantic columns that would open up to reveal things inside, like a jazz band or marionettes.” Given what has happened around the power station since then, his psychedelic phantasmagoria may well have been preferable to seeing it choked with luxury flats. “They wanted me to bring Las Vegas to Wandsworth,” he says, the irrepressible giggle returning. “I ultimately resigned, but we had a lot of fun.”
