There was a time when an architectural idea could run through a building like letters through a stick of rock, when everything from a door handle to a city block would express the same intent. What a building looked like, the way it was made, its plan and forms, its detail and decoration, would all pull together. This could be true of any style, from Arts and Crafts to Palladian to brutalist. It required the architect to be in charge, to have an overall directing eye.
Those days have, with a few exceptions, gone. The architect is now one consultant among many, and the component parts of a building – frame, cladding, heating and ventilating, finishes – are delivered in packages by different subcontractors. The parts tend to coexist rather than cohere. The London practice of Henley Halebrown, however, won’t take this shift lying down. Its inspirations include the Philadelphian Louis Kahn and the Glaswegians Gillespie, Kidd and Coia – architects who made their poetry out of the substance and mass of their buildings.
