Cullinan oeuvre.

By Jonathan Hale. London: Black Dog. 2005, [pounds sterling]29.95

This book reminds one of how many good buildings have been produced by the Cullinan office, their great variety, and the sheer inventiveness of the ideas behind them: spatial, constructive, and environmental. Ted has come a long way from the modest house he still inhabits in Camden Mews to the astonishing string of pavilions for Maths at Cambridge and the big civic projects now under way. Nobody seems in much doubt that he is the centre of the whole operation, but the credits page at the end of the book reveals that nearly 200 architects have now worked for the office, many going on later to start highly respected practices of their own. They include the author of the book and are listed chronologically without hierarchy, in line with the office's intended equality and generous policy of profit-sharing. The shared authorship from this society of architects is teamwork of the best kind, but the resulting variety may also account for some of the difficulty in placing the firm and its work. This is a question mulled over by Paul Finch in the preface before Hale takes it on more seriously. But he too struggles to establish a decisive position for Cullinans, running through a list of past categorisations including AR's 'Romantic Pragmatism' only to plump for Frampton's (1983) 'Architecture of Resistance', meaning resistance to the dominance of technology. This is surely too negative a banner, but Hale's remaining text takes a more positive stance under headings like: 'Architecture as Place-Making', 'The Geometry of an Idea', 'From the Cave to the Nest' and so on. These themes document Ted's stated concerns rather in the way that he lectures, and Hale has added more of his own like a 'four elements of architecture derived from Semper. This method is illuminating, connects common phenomena that were by no means obvious, and plays with the chronology as predicted by the title, but with one disadvantage: illustrations of the same building are divided between chapters, in some cases without enough drawings to let one properly relive the buildings. I was left wondering what the whole oeuvre adds up to. Is it really so diverse and contingent that one can only go and visit the buildings? Certainly there are no neat summarising concepts or key details in the sense one expects from Mies or Foster, but being inclusive and varied rather than exclusive and reductive should have its rewards and its own means of presentation. This book only gets us part of the way, and it lacks the fullness of drawings required for a definitive documentation. Layout and presentation are attractive, and there are fine photo essays on particular works, but some pictures are slightly blurred suggesting scanning problems: it is a shame that Black Dog did not spot this before they went to print.

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