Kenneth Frampton Modern Architecture
PUBLISHED BY THAMES & HUDSON
EDITED BY SARAH YATES
TEXT BY KENNETH FRAMPTON
If there is a London-based architect whose work brings to mind the elusive nature of architecture in an age that is transfixed by the spectacular, then it is the Irish architect Níall McLaughlin, who has been practising in the UK since the mid-1990s. His hyper-sensitive approach invariably alludes to the time-honoured crafted tradition of building in wood.
McLaughlin unequivocally evokes this in his Bishop Edward King chapel built in 2013 for a theological college in Cuddesdon, Oxfordshire, wherein a cruck-timber frame supporting a carinated roof, is encompassed by a concrete shell faced with brick tiles.
At the same time, a timber fishing hut that he built in Hampshire two years later pays homage to both the Japanese timber tradition and to medieval oak framing. The Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre that McLaughlin built for Worcester College, Oxford, in 2017 demonstrates the comprehensive range of his vision. The symmetrical front of the building, facing onto a lawn, is related at the rear to the existing dormitories asymmetrically, the two axes being reconciled through the light-weight timber framing of the foyer about tl1e quadrant of the central auditorium.