Peter Salter: Walmer Yard - Tapa dura

Peter Salter is an architect and teacher (at the Architectural Association, the University of East London, the University of Bath, and the Welsh School of Architecture) whose work has influenced several generations of students. Walmer Yard, in Notting Hill, is his first residential project in the UK and one of only a small number of buildings he has completed worldwide. Although modest in scale, the project is extraordinary in many ways. On an irregularly shaped site, Salter’s design brings four houses into a complex relationship with each other, half-formal, half-familiar, interdependent yet solitary. Similarly, the relations among the core team who developed the design are more nuanced than in most architectural projects, since they all met at the Architectural Association in Peter Salter’s unit, where Crispin Kelly (the client) and Fenella Collingridge (Peter’s current collaborator) were student contemporaries. This book documents the project with Peter Salter’s original pen-and-ink drawings and Hélène Binet’s extraordinary photographs.

Peter Salter began his career in the studio of Alison and Peter Smithson. In the early 1980s, he formed a partnership with Christopher Macdonald, producing a series of projects known for their highly developed and evocative drawings. Throughout the 1980s and '90s he taught at the Architectural Association as a unit master. In 1995, he became professor and head of school at the University of East London, and is now Professor of Architectural Design at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. In 2004, he won the RIBA Annie Spink Award for his outstanding contribution to architectural education, and in 2012 was elected a Hon FRIBA. In 2018, he and Fenella Collingridge exhibited Proposal B at the Venice Biennale. Walmer Yard received a RIBA National Award in 2017. Fenella Collingridge was associate designer of Walmer Yard. Crispin Kelly was the developer of Walmer Yard. Peter Beardsell taught at Chelsea College of Art and Design, in Interior and Spatial Design. He is currently a visiting critic at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. Mark Dorrian holds the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh and co-directs Metis, an atelier for art, architecture and urbanism. Matthew Ritchie is a visual artist whose work has been exhibited worldwide, including the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Architecture Biennale. He is currently an Artist-in-Residence at MIT and a Mentor Professor at Columbia University. Helene Binet is a Swiss/French photographer, currently living in London. Her work has been published in a wide range of books, and shown in numerous exhibitions. An advocate of analogue photography, she works exclusively with film. In 2019 she was awarded the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for her exceptional contribution in the field of architecture.