Tradition and innovation John McAslan + Partners.

Founder of a practice known both for its responsive remodelling of existing buildings and innovative new work, John McAslan's lives in architecture are introduced by Martin Pawley.

To date, John McAslan has had two lives in architecture, both spent in Notting Hill Gate, west London. The first, and for several years the sole British architect to have contributed a building to Canary Wharf he and his former partner Jamie Troughton made a formidable name from themselves in the late 1980s as aspiring and marketable Modernists from the Foster-Rogers stable. Then came the cruel property recession which the practice robustly shouldered, but which paralleled the ending of the partnership. When the economy recovered and the dust settled, circa 1996, there was McAslan, with his studio in his own name, still an aspiring Modernist, but somehow having gained a reputation as a safe pair of hands with a listed building too. And marketable? Well yes, he could still do commercial with the best of them, but cultural and institutional success, and phenomenal skill at winning Lottery grants, seemed somehow to have put that side of things in the shade.

A good take on McAslan's blessed present state comes from Peter Jeffree, chief architect for the John Lewis Partnership. Jeffree has remarked, apropos McAslan + Partners' remodelling of the Peter Jones department store in London's Sloane Square (itself a modern cultural icon as much as a department store), that the practice 'offers a balance between being committed Modernists and reverent academics' -- in short they not only work logically in the modern manner, but think flexibly when it comes to stuff like the relationship of the old and the new and the spaces in between.

Of course there are those who might say that logical and flexible sounds too good to be true. Might that be no more than a coded way of drawing attention to an ability to accept compromise, an omnivorousness, and a variety of output that makes his oeuvre -- in the language of the motor industry -- somehow unintegrated?

Not in McAslan's case. Here in these pages, and especially in his work with existing buildings, you will detect strong creative trains of thought that connect seemingly disparate commissions in time and space -- Florida Southern College, the De La Warr Pavilion, Benenden Hospital, Trinity College of Music, the cultural centre at Derngate and so on up the scale to his vast King's Cross station masterplan -- all of them on equal terms with the work of such estimable precursors as Frank Lloyd Wright, Erich Mendelsohn, Thomas Tait, Wren, Hawksmoor, Mackintosh, Cubitt and others - progenitors of the original buildings so expertly revised, enlarged and reworked by McAslan himself according to a single idea teased from a difficult brief. For example, the great floating wings he has proposed for the concourse at King's Cross, twice the scale of Saarinen's roof at Washington Dulles Airport, would in effect not only bridge a gap but create a new building in the space between King's Cross and Saint Pancras stations.

Where new work untrammelled by context is concerned, reasonableness visibly relinquishes the controls to logic, not least in the matter of the driving force of the design. In his large operations centre for the Turkish Yapi Kredi Bank in Istanbul, McAslan has articulated the whole complex by means of a matrix of spacious top-lit internal streets that are securely anchored at each end by combined intersections and stair and lift towers -- a perfect formula for future expansion, and one that is reworked in his other ongoing large overseas commission, the Italian Max Mara headquarters under construction at Reggio Emilia, south of Milan.

Unlike some architects who weary of the constant travelling required by global practice, when given the opportunity to explore offers abroad, McAslan revels in it While he makes no secret of his desire to work in the United States again -- the firm is presently developing a number of projects there -- he finds that he gains unique perspectives from every expedition abroad. 'You find a hybrid way of working from seeing how things are done in other countries', he says, 'it's a method I find invigorating.'

Today McAslan leads his 50 person studio with a youthful energetic team which embraces architects, industrial designers and landscape designers. When pressed, McAslan defines their shared aims to 'innovate' while 'building bridges between architecture and engineering, with clarity and legibility' -- a motto it would be difficult to improve on.

De La Warr Pavilion

Bex Hill

John McAslan + Partners (JMP) is still a comparatively young practice, set up by John McAslan in 1996, following his ten-year association in practice with Jamie Troughton. But during the five short years of its existence, John McAslan + Partners has amassed a remarkable and diverse body of works in Europe, the Middle East, America and Africa, as well as Britain. This is because John McAslan has actively sought diversity and challenge, often rejecting projects that he considered did not take the practice forward experimentally and professionally (a considerable risk for a young firm). From the outset, he has been determined that the practice should not become typecast, stranded on some self-contained island of, say, commercial development. He has, he says, a horror of finding himself coasting mindlessly along. 'Risk creates adrenalin', he asserts.

On meeting McAslan for the first time, you quickly become aware of a supple architectural intelligence. It was nourished first by childhood in the west of Scotland and gradual appreciation of the rich cultural legacy of that part of the world. (He relates how as a boy he loved drawing industrial ruins, tower houses and brochs 'very badly'.) Bom in Glasgow in 1954, and brought up in Dunoon, he is the son of a doctor. His father's family were shoe merchants, his mother's lawyers. And it is easy to imagine, observing the determination with which he pursues his goals, and the cool rationality with which he approaches the business of architecture, that growing up a member of the Scots 'impoverished professional class', as he puts it, bequeathed the resilience and grit coupled with an inclusive view of the world with which that type is historically associated. 'As my mother says (borrowing from John Buchan), "There's no finer sight than that of a Scotsman on the make!",' observes McAslan.

The arrival, when McAslan was a child growing up in the '50s and '60s, of the American Polaris base brought thousands of American servicemen to the west coast. They brought intimations of a futuristic culture which, glimpsed in films, magazines, and their memorabilia seemed to him magical. It was the beginning of an affinity that, deepened by experience of living and working in the United States, persists. While training as an architect in Edinburgh ('very parochial for a world city'), he escaped to America in vacations, working as an assistant in a number of offices in Baltimore and Boston.

'Working in the States was an eye-opening and uplifting period', he recalls. 'I spent my free time crisscrossing the country looking at everything from Fumess onwards, but particularly the early Modernists, searching out their buildings. It's their integrity and optimism that I love, the heroic quality of Saarinen's terminal at Dulles Airport, the way it still works perfectly, while adapting and extending to its increased usage'. Influences of buildings such as Kahn's Yale Art Gallery and Mellon Center in New Haven, Wright's Falling Water in Pennsylvania, Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center in Boston, and others, have lasted; his absorption and comprehension of them have helped shape one of the strong underlying philosophical threads in his work. Architecture critic Ken Powell has observed that McAslan leads the way among contemporary figures in reinterpreting the themes and spirit of Kahn's architecture.

His experience of working in the office of Cambridge Seven Associates in Boston between 1978 and 1979 was seminal and 'inspirational'. The multi-disciplinary atelier and its open way of working, 'its theoretical, artistic and strongly visual ethos', has provided the model for his own studio practice in Notting Hill Gate. In 1980, McAslan returned to Britain, settling in London and marrying his American wife, Dava, the following year. For three years he worked for the Richard Rogers' office 'which remains a very special period for me - I still have enduring friendships from the Rogers office', before going on to found Troughton McAslan in 1984 with another Rogers colleague, Jamie Troughton, which was to prove a fruitful association for over a decade.

Long ago, McAslan's architecture began to diverge, in more complex ways, away from the crisp Modernist expressions of engineering that, falling within the Foster-Rogers tradition, came to be associated with Troughton McAslan. One important strand of his work has always had to do with existing buildings but to discover its great distinction and weight is something of a surprise.

Ken Powell remarks that McAslan's 'passionate interest in architectural theory - he recalls "dabbling in history" from his student days onwards - began to find expression in his architecture quite early on'. His heroes included not only the Americans, Wright and Kahn, along with Mackintosh and other architects of the Free Style, but equally engineers and 'constructors' such as Jean Prouve.

Some of McAslan's present work with historic buildings began well before formation of the new practice, but the studio's apparently continuous battles to save masterworks by, among others, Erich Mendelsohn, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh seem to have become a speciality, (The list should also include Wells Coates. McAslan's efforts, begun in 1995 to save Isokon Flats, Hampstead, then in the ownership of Camden Council, from social and physical decay provided the basis for subsequent private restoration.) Such battles have sometimes acquired a heroic quality as McAslan has taken the initiative, and launched himself in to help raise the necessary funds personally to kick-start projects-an activity for which he has shown an energetic talent; and it is very possible that were it not for his and his team's efforts, a number of precious monuments would be subsiding into rubble. One of these projects consisted, for instance, of his early I 990s survey of industrial building regeneration in the UK.

The restoration and remodelling of the De La Warr Pavilion, by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff, in genteel Bexhill-on-Sea, seems to have been a seminal experience for the practice and one that has led to other important commissions. Work began in 1991 and will continue until (at least) 2003 when the final elements in the Lottery-funded scheme are complete. 'It's remarkable how long these endeavours can take', observes McAslan. 'Adam Brown and I started this project ten years ago. Our client Rother District Council, has remained constant.'

By the 1980s, the Modem Movement gem was in a state of serious decay and its future uncertain, in spite of being Grade I listed. The Pavilion was saved in the first instance by local campaigners who formed a volunteer trust (led by the 'remarkable' Jill Theis and others), and then by collaborative efforts by the trust, JMP, the local authority and Mendelsohn's daughter, Esther. English Heritage provided funds for restoring and maintaining the fabric; and a change of use, from local theatre to regional arts centre raised various grants, from the European Commission's Heritage Fund, the Sports and Arts Foundation, and Lottery money. Though the project has been beset by often frustrating delays in funding, JMP's devotion to it has been always wholehearted and personal.

PETER JONES

LONDON

The team's initial masterplan, focusing on demonstrating options to enhance the building's artistic programme and usage, led to the reconstruction of the Pavilion's external fabric, and this in turn to a phased programme of work to bring the interior back to life. The theatre has been carefully remodelled and an art gallery and cafe added. The Pavilion's size has always posed a problem. Originally, it was part of a larger scheme that, a victim of the Second World War, was never built Neither was an extension proposed during the early '60s by Maxwell Fry. The next phase, beginning now, consists of new wings of studio theatres and galleries, with a final cycle of repairs and restoration. For McAslan himself, the experience of working with - inside - Mendelsohn has had a richly rewarding, and expressive, impact on his work. Outwardly, the project has revealed McAslan's ability to see beyond restoration of an iconic building to its renaissance as an integral part of local and national cultural life.

All Londoners are familiar with Peter Jones department store. Filling out an island site on the western edge of Sloane Square and swinging elegantly into King's Road, like the prow of a liner, it makes a great deal of the corner. As an institution, the store has never seemed comfortable with attempts to reach a wider clientele. It is a part of old Chelsea, belonging more to the culture once contained within the squares and streets of what John Betjeman called 'Pont Street Dutch', that run north and south of the Square, than to King's Roads raffishness, Designed by Slater & Moberley (1935-37) in a manner reminiscent of Mendelsohn, the building is a Modern Movement treasure and is listed Grade [II.sup.*]. On the north-west corner is a house designed by A. H. Mackmurdo.

Considering the clear elegance of the exterior and central void, the building's interior at the edges has always seemed fussy and incomprehensible with inconvenient changes of levels. This is in small part, perhaps, a hangover from its beginnings when the store was perceived as a very local resource, the useful place where gentility bought items of daily life -- needles and thread, school uniforms and curtain material. But the sense of bits being tacked on can only be due to the building having been constructed in phases interrupted by the Second World War; the last phase was completed only in the 1960s.

Asked to modernize, rationalize and enlarge the store, 'filling in the external voids and extending it upward', as McAslan puts it, JMP has characteristically concentrated on giving it a new lease of life, one that is in keeping with the spirit of the '30s exterior and that will last for the next 100 years. The gleaming envelope with its vertical and horizontal rhythms within the [pounds sterling]100 million scheme, will undergo only minimal changes, but JMP's plans for the interior evoke the tradition of the great Parisian department stores, like the Samaritaine, which celebrate shopping and the contribution these buildings make to the life of the city.

Within Peter Jones, the practice is carving out a top-lit atrium that will bring airiness and light into the centre of the store. An integrated environmental strategy that exploits the building's existing fabric (with the atrium acting as a plenum system for extracting air), together with a dramatic sweep of escalators to all levels, will revolutionize life for staff and shoppers. Work is advanced on the first of three complex independent phases, strategically planned by McAslan's office with contractor Bovis and enabling two-thirds of the store to remain trading at any one time, with completion in stages from late 2002. Over the years, Sloane Square has become a mere traffic island. A regenerated Peter Jones and the possible extension of the Royal Court cafe into the square's tree-lined centre will restore it to life.

MAX MARA HQ

REGGIO EMILIA

JMP's design of the 40 000[m.sup.2] headquarters for the italian fashion house, Max Mara, in the Po Valley, belongs to a family of international projects by the practice for large organizations. Of these, the giant low-energy operations centre for the Yapi Kredi Bank on a site to the south-east of Istanbul, descending in a series of terraces towards the Sea of Marmara and completed in 1999, is an obvious and important precedent.

Accommodation within the complex, for over 2500 people, was expressed as a series of eight three-floor buildings connected by a grid of stepped top-lit internal streets. References to Kahn, contained in the supple, molecular conformation of the complex, were allied to others, drawn from contemporary developments in northern European office planning, such as Niels Torp's SAS headquarters in Stockholm, Henning Larsen's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Riyadh and Herman Hertzberger's early work on office design. But in Istanbul, the human dimension, animating formality, drew strong inspiration from the historic Ottoman traditions of intimate courtyard forms and bustling covered streets.

Sharing its Kahnian underpinning with Yapi Kredi, the design of Max Mara's headquarters also follows a molecular pattern. But in Italy, the intensity of the bazaar has been replaced with something calmer and looser, that relates to the larger pastoral landscape of the Po Valley with its flat fields and water, wide skies, scattered farm buildings and avenues of poplars.

The site just outside Reggio Emilia, south of Milan and just east of the Al autostrada, occupies 30 hectares of low-lying agricultural land and McAslan's scheme, distributed in an orderly grid, takes account of the tranquillity and nature of the landscape, of the local vernacular, and of Max Mara's desire to avoid any references to a corporate statement. In the event, the practice has created a pastoral campus with pavilions, canals and groves of trees, in harmony with its surroundings.

The molecular plan allows for growth and flexibility; it imposes gentle order on a site with little physical definition and creates a matrix in which the different elements -- top-lit studios and offices, showroom and warehousing -- are integrated with the landscape and carefully disposed across the site, which itself is unified by a series of tracks, water channels, forest glades and allees of ordered agricultural landscapes. In shaping the site as a setting for the buildings, McAslan and his associate Andrew Hapgood worked with landscape architect Peter Walker, a master at understanding big landscapes from his work in the US and elsewhere. The new canals, traversed by bridges, drain the land (the water table here is close to the surface); and newly planted trees soften the big car park and create a setting for the three clusters of pavilions for studios and offices. The top-lit buildings with their low-pitched roofs, gathered around a central courtyard and linked by 'streets', echo the simple dignity of loc al vernacular architecture, which Luigi Maramotti, Max Mara's chairman, so enjoys. 'This is a long-term commitment' says McAslan. 'We won the competition in 1996 and completion will not take place until early 2003. Fast-track construction this ain't', he remarks.

SEAGER DISTILLERY

DEPTFORD

'The glories of Deptford are departed', says Nikolaus Pevsner. Lying to the west of Greenwich, on a southern sweep of the Thames opposite the Isle of Dogs, the place was once the cradle of Henry VIII's shipyard (later Samuel Pepys Victualling Yard), with handsome mansions belonging to sea-lords and merchants. Today a large part of it consists of unlovely housing estates and derelict industrial wastes, Some fragments of old Deptford survive here and there, notably in the sombre eighteenth-century church of St Paul on the High Street, in Albury Street, one of the most complete early eighteenth-century streets in London, and in the largely Victorian high street core of shops, pubs, terraces and workplaces.

During the past few years, some regeneration of Deptford has been quietly taking place. It began when young professionals, driven by rising property prices in central London and Greenwich, gradually found cheaper accommodation here. Links to and from central London are generally good, with bus links and the south-east line to London Bridge and the City. The arrival of the new Docklands Light Railway station at Deptford Bridge will speed passengers eastwards to City Airport Cultural developments underway include the new Laban Centre of contemporary dance. But the linchpin in local authority plans to revive the area is JMP's important mixed use residential development being designed for Brookmill Estates, at the site of the Old Seager Distillery on Deptford Bridge. When completed. it will inject into the area the life of a new community, occupying high-density private, as well as affordable, housing, live/work units and workplaces, shops, an art gallery, and a range of social and cultural amenities.

One of the strengths of JMP's scheme being led by McAslan's longtime colleague and partner Murray Smith (and editor of the practice's quarterly journal), is its recognition of potential. The Seager site is pivotal, at a point where the Ravensboume River discharges into Deptford Creek, and where, marking a Roman crossing. the A2 crosses the river at Deptford Bridge. At present, the river is little more than a muddy concrete channel; it will, the architects point out as part of the scheme become a watercourse again. Similarly, Broadway Fields to the south is a bedraggled play area, but will be turned into a graceful park and valuable local amenity.

The scheme roughly describes a quarter-circle with its northern radius bounded by Deptford Bridge, its western one by Brookmill Road. From this road, its outer crescent sweeps up from south to north, past the playing fields and river edge, to Deptford Bridge. At the centre is a landscaped courtyard. To emphasize the scheme's integration with the neighbourhood, public footpaths traverse the site. As it sweeps round in a series of five buildings, the crescent steps up in height. In elevation, it reaches a crescendo in the form of a 26-storey high tower. Cruciform in plan, the tower steps back from Deptford Bridge in deference to the listed Seager building framing the entrance to the site: retained and remodelled, the nineteenth-century Seager warehouse will be turned into a gallery for Goldsmiths College, with a flush glazed rooftop extension enclosing a cafe and gallery.

Architectural language relates to the robust aesthetic of industrial buildings. Identities of the different buildings will be expressed through use of materials and articulation of their construction, Frames of the lower buildings, clad with timber panels, will be expressed. Overtime, the slow weathering of natural materials will contribute to character. In contrast, the smoother zinc-clad cantilevered surfaces of the tower, punched with hanging gardens surmounted by a lantern observatory, will engage the watery light. With some notable exceptions, modem developments along the Thames have failed to respond to the scale of the river and wide flat sweep of the estuary landscape. In its vision and execution, JMP's scheme does exactly that.

FENCHURCH STREET 

LONDON

When completed in 2003, the crystalline 13-storey tower of Vitro, Fenchurch Street will be JMP's first building in the City of London. Built on an island site for developer Frogmore, its north face lies flush with Fenchurch Street's long thoroughfare. Immediately to the south of it is a small square, its irregular form a consequence of war-time bombing, and beyond it is the historic Victorian terminus of Fenchurch Street station.

The street itself is of little architectural interest; much more intriguing is the pattern of narrow alleys that cross it from north to south. It is a pattern that is reflected in abstract fashion in the design of the tower. As City buildings go, this one is not immoderately large, nor does its plan follow the pattern of its massive neighbours, the Lloyd's Registry building and Plantation Place. Both of these developments built around internal precincts stand apart from the busy street. Curiously, because the plot is small, measuring only 21 x 27m, and because of the method by which the architect will articulate its form, you will have the impression of a bigger building of greater verticality. Size, in any case, is dissipated by an exquisite sense of transparency, for this ethereal tower seems entirely composed of layers of light.

The ground floor will engage the street and its square to the south with shops and restaurants. Above, are 12 floors of clear span office space, with galleries running north-south, achieved by extending a linear service core down the east side of the building. This side on to Fenchurch Place will be animated and energized, particularly after dark, by the constant movement of glass lifts and visual effect of delicately composed glass and steel staircases at either end. Two slender stone-clad towers, containing lavatories and fire-fighting shaft, form vertical punctuations, their solidity and massiveness anchoring the otherwise transparent, airy glass skin.

The structure (which recalls SOM's Inland Steel building in Chicago), is designed to be as light and transparent as possible, with the vertical and horizontal emphases of the composition forming a play on proportion. The steel frame incorporates cellular beams for integrated servicing with an innovative perimeter detail that will eliminate the need for spandrel panels, and add to the impression of verticality. The face of the building on to Fenchurch Street is indented, The slot narrows the street frontage, incorporates an entrance galleria which links Fenchurch Street to the square beyond, and indicates separation of service core and the main body of the building. From Fenchurch Place, you can see through the transparent stair tower with its diagonal stairs to clear space, and beyond into the diaphanous offices.

Currently an unloved and neglected space, the square forms an integral part of JMP's proposal, inspired by such modern urban examples as Paley Park in New York, and by an awareness that such areas are rare and precious in the City. JMP's plans to landscape it, and channel the tide of pedestrians that crosses it to and from the station, will transform it into a jewel-like park and add another dimension to this part of the City.

KING'S CROSS STATION

LONDON

By far the largest and most important civic/urban commission for the practice is for the redevelopment of King's Cross Station in London. While the scheme deals with the functional problems of linking rail, under- and over-ground networks, with the logistical ones of shifting tens of millions of people around in an orderly and agreeable fashion, McAslan has a more exuberant ideal -- that of creating a heroic public space, to exhilarate and to be experienced against the backdrop of Lewis Cubitt's austere, noble train sheds of 1852 and the fantastical neo-Gothic elaborations of St Pancras station to the west.

King's Cross is Grade I listed, and considered one of the most important railway buildings in the world. But the station has long been a byword for squalor -- physical and architectural. The clarity of Cubitt's plan, whereby arriving and departing passengers were channelled through buildings along the flanks of the two train sheds, was long ago abandoned in favour of a succession of ill-considered concourses built on to the front of the facade. The present concourse, erected in the 1970s and half the size required for the 35 million or so passengers using King's Cross at present, is a low and dark unlovely sight which contributes to the general air of degradation around the station.

The list of King's Cross's deficiencies is long. Apart from aesthetics, concourse space is practically insufficient, and the quality of waiting and circulation areas is poor. In view of government plans to increase rail travel across the UK by 50 per cent over 10 years, together with train-operating companies' needs at King's Cross, the eight long and three short platforms are inadequate and already subject to overcrowding. Research indicates that platforms up to 300m long will be required. Many basic station operations and passenger amenities are sub-standard. In particular, train-servicing is inefficient and clashes with passenger circulation.

In 1998, Railtrack commissioned JMP to develop a masterplan for transforming King's Cross. The practice's most significant proposals include: upgrade of the existing eight long and three short platforms to provide 12 platforms each 300m long; construction of a new concourse with connections to London Underground below, and St Pancras to the west, taxi points, and links to short-stay car parking and bus stops. The existing train shed will also be refurbished to provide additional concourse and support facilities at its southern end. Site restrictions are complex; JMP's scheme is the transportation hub of ambitious regenerative plans currently being prepared by developer Argent St George and London & Continental Railways for the area to the west and north of the station. Enhancement of King's Cross will be coordinated with the upgrading of the East Coast Mainline and neighbouring developments: construction of London Underground's new northern ticket hall at King's Cross directly below McAslan's proposed concour se and the new Channel Tunnel Rail Link in St Pancras, with the consequent realignment of Pancras Road. London Transport has plans for tram and bus services: and P&O sites on York Way, on the east side of the King's Cross, are being redeveloped, all of which are accommodated within McAslan's overall plan, the project being led by his partner Adam Brown.

Architecturally, the jewel will be JMP's proposed western concourse. Conceived as a huge hail which elevates its functionality to that of a great civic building, and reminiscent of Saarinen's Dulles and TWA terminals, its footprint is shaped by the urban form to the west, the geometry of the northern platforms, and London Underground's new ticket hall below. Equipped with all the facilities required by modem travel interchanges, the hall is subtly designed to shape passenger flows with connections made visible.

The structure itself (designed by McAslan and his partner Martin Markcrow and in collaboration with Ove Arup's engineers) is heroic. Inclined glass walls are surmounted by a floating concrete roof -- like the powerful curving wings of a pteradactyl. Formed by the intersection of toroidal geometries, the roof is composed of two shells that interlock at the centre of which is a great glass oculus. These are supported by two pairs of V-shaped columns straddling the Underground station. On its eastern side, the building is pulled away from the station's western range to create a luminous top-lit transition zone with retail and support areas, links to the tube and principal platforms. At first floor level, a bridge leads to the old booking hall, which will incorporate additional station functions. When built the structure will complete a remarkable assemblage of railway architecture stretching across time and encompassing aspirational and cultural changes in travel. Its presence will mark a breadth of vision, and the courage to confront a formidable challenge -- that of transforming one of the most dismal, but functionally vital, parts of centr al London into a well-ordered, and elegant transport interchange.

MMU MANCHESTER & SOUTHERN COLLEGE FLORIDA

With over 32000 students, Manchester Metropolitan University attracts superlatives. It is the largest university in the UK. Its seven campuses are part of the city's enormous university precinct which, also embracing Manchester University and its Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), is the largest in Europe.

JMP's new building for MMU, recently begun on site and due for completion in 2003, is located in All Saints, a campus which grew up around the green oasis of Grosvenor Square, off Oxford Road. Ad hoc as it was, the development within easy reach of the heart of Manchester, does impart something of the traditional character of a university in a city. Architecturally, the campus is largely made up of post-Second World War buildings, put up in the 1960s and '70s; and it is severed from science and engineering departments, on the John Dalton site to the north, by the rush and noise of the elevated Mancunian Way. Constructed in 1972, the motorway effectively cut through north-south links in the old grid of streets off Oxford Road, and pedestrian links underneath it are dismal and unsafe.

As a first step in revitalizing the sprawling campus, MMU asked for a building that will act as a gateway and marker for the campus. To be known as All Saints West, it will provide a new home for the university's law faculty, as well as lecture theatres, conference facilities and a galleria with exhibition spaces accessible to all departments and the general public.

The site for the landmark was challenging. Measuring around 35m wide by 25m deep, it is hemmed in on three sides by existing buildings, and is bounded on the north by the Mancunian Way. Design of the new building had to take account of noise and air pollution, and the fact that daylight at lower levels was going to be limited. JMP's solution is a diaphanous glass and steel tower, rising seven storeys like a crystal beacon above the motorway and visible from it. It is pierced by an atrium that brings light down through the building to the ground floor, and enhances its transparency. Like JMP's Vitro tower in Fenchurch Street, London (p20), it will look as if it is composed of layers of light, and has a distinctive planning hierarchy expressed in its architecture.

To improve pedestrian flow through and around the campus, the building is made part of a diagonal north-south route, linking Grosvenor Square with the John Dalton site and passing through the volumetric galleria and public concourse on the ground floor. From the concourse, there is access to the service core down the east side of the building, to lifts, stairs and lavatories.

The central atrium and linear service core leave floor plates clear. With luminous communal spaces contained on lower floors, the upper levels will provide cellular teaching rooms and offices for the law school. At fourth floor level, the building is free of the shadows of neighbouring buildings, and a series of classrooms around the perimeter will be open to air and light. Academic staff will either have offices looking into the atrium or are housed on the sixth (top) floor, with views out.

Expressive invention seems a particular feature of JMP's university buildings, where money is often short and sites difficult. It was evident in the practice's design of a transparent heart for the student centre in Belfast (p38) and in its galleried Middle East Institute for the School of Oriental and African Studies in London's Bloomsbury. At MMU, invention has produced the delight of stacked lecture theatres, contained one on top of the other in a great semi-circular bite out of the south side of the building (when seen in section). This is the darkest part of the site, where the building backs up against the rear wall of All Saints' library. Each theatre is double height, and enclosed on the north by the curving perforated timber wall which runs the width of the building, and bulges into the tall thin atrium. Bridges spanning it at ground and second floor levels lead to curving breaches in the wall. The upper theatre has moveable bleacher seats; seating in the lower one is fixed.

When completed next year, MMU's new law faculty building will form a distinctive marker for the city, and acts as a confident symbol of MMU's wider regeneration. Underpinning JMP's restoration of the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill (p4) was the determination to revive an architectural gem, to make it work again, and the excitement of working with its author. The same determination and excitement has propelled JMP's reworking of Frank Lloyd Wright's extraordinary campus at Florida Southern College, built between 1938 and 1958 and containing the largest single-usage concentration of the architect's works anywhere.

Begun in 1993, the commission was the consequence of passion and spontaneous initiative on McAslan's part. Overtime in the steamy climate, the 'textile' block buildings had been slowly sinking into sad decay, due in part to their unsupervised construction which often included students building campus structures in lieu of tuition fees. Surveying the damage on a visit to the campus in 1993, fuelled by failed efforts to contain the spalling and cracking concrete, McAslan enlisted the help of John Figg of Ove Arup & Partners. Together they researched and analyzed the structures, with the encouragement of the college and, initially, without compensation. Their initiative was followed, once again, by a spell of energetic fundraising. Its outcome was a second phase. underwritten by a donation from Lord Palumbo --Britain's patron of Modemism -- and matched by a Florida State Preservation grant, in which more detailed structural analyses were carried out, and a long-term maintenance strategy formulated. In addition, a masterplan was prepared which proposed the reinstatement of Wright's west campus, landscape enhancements, the selective removal of redundant non-Wright structures and a series of new academic and support buildings. With the lightest of touches, which leaves the original intact, the practice has just completed the remodelling of the Polk County Science Center, Wright's last building on the campus, and the first phase of the masterplan's implementation. Unnecessary and unsightly accretions have been stripped away and the building replanned to accommodate new teaching spaces and laboratories. Threaded through the building is the deliberately expressed language of MEP services, so that new insertions, like ducting and laboratory supplies, are clearly new and replaceable. In addition, the first phase of new student residences has been completed, designed to concept stage by the practice and then developed locally, while schemes for extending Wright's linking canopies, and for a new student centre are complete a nd await funding. The Gateway Student Center is the subject of a fundraising drive presently under way. Signalling the front door to the campus, as well as providing a focus for student activity, the building will bring together academic and administrative staff and provide offices and seminar spaces. Furthermore it will result in four of the remaining Wright structures being freed of the clutter of their later added administrative elements, allowing them once again to 'breathe' and become teaching blocks.

Composed of two wings on either side of a raised and covered open forum, the structure consists of a steel frame, externally latticed with wood and glass panelling. In scale and in its villa-like form, it relates to the local vernacular of the surrounding residential neighbourhood. 'The forum is central to the idea, providing a lofty canopied hall like the courtyard of a madrasa', McAslan observes. He draws a parallel with Renzo Piano's famous de Menil gallery in Houston, where the elongated villa, with lush loggias and courtyard, is surrounded by suburbia, and where, McAslan remarks, 'It works so beautifully as a single building on the site, relating perfectly to its neighbourhood'.

QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY.

BELFAST

JMP's competition proposal for a new student centre for Queen's, Belfast's leading university is based on a specific response to the place, the buildings and landscape, and generates a new pedestrian route linking across the campus. The team deliberately set out to create a 'timeless icon', 'a building which by its very quality would set an aspirational precedent for the university and future buildings in Belfast'.

Queen's campus falls into two parts, north and south of University Road. JMP's proposal would be built in phases, the first consisting of the main student building in the southern campus; later phases, in the northern one, providing a stepped arena in front of the university's Victorian Lanyon Building, and an island canopy for pedestrian crossing. The whole has been designed as an assembly of expressive shell forms rising like outcrops from a parkland setting. A tapering top-lit concourse diving momentarily beneath University Road runs from the student centre to the arena and links the campus's two divided part.

With the form of a great, transparent heart -- an entirely appropriate metaphor for a living student body -- the new centre looks across the road to the Lanyor building and site of the proposed arena. On its lower levels is cellular accommodation for offices and meeting rooms; higher up are bars, cafes and recreational areas opening on stacked terraces. The delicately transparent skin of the building is made up of a lightweight steel structure supporting a system of inflatable, insulated and transparent PTFE cladding panels. Contained within the envelope is a series of floor plates set around a dramatic atrium that rises through the building from the main concourse on the lower ground floor. The arrangement permits consistent floor-plate depth from perimeter to atrium and an interior drenched with daylight.

Servicing is intended to be as ecological as possible. Fritting the inflated cushions, according to calculations of the sun's seasonal path, maintains transparency while protecting the interior from solar gain in summer, and allowing a limited amount of heating in winter. Partitioning systems around offices and meeting rooms transmit diffused daylight through large areas of glazing; opening vents admit fresh air. A robust approach to finishes includes exposing the primary concrete structure that will be exploited to create a thermal flywheel effect. Power and IT distribution would be threaded through a suspended floor, and other services -- mechanical ventilation, lighting and water--would run at soffit level in suspended ceiling cavities.

To be constructed in later phases, the partly subterranean concourse, sculptural in form and carefully illuminated, would create a natural linking device on axis with the centre of the Lanyon building. Another corridor off the concourse emerges in a third shell-like canopy in University Road, distinctively marking the entrance to the site for the many members of staff and students who approach Queen's from the east.

BENENDEN HOSPITAL, KENT

Benenden Hospital occupies a green rural site outside the village of Benenden in Kent. It began life as a tuberculosis clinic and is now a semiprivate hospital for civil servants. Development of the site began in the 1930s, and subsequently took place in the 1950s, and in the 1980s when the main hospital block was built. The original sanatorium, the Lister Wing to the south of the main building, was designed by Burnett Tait & Lorne in 1937, at a time when fresh air, beautiful landscape and widely spaced buildings were thought essential for better health. As a fine example of pre-war International Style Modernism, it is one of only a handful in Britain and is Grade II listed. Its design was evidently influenced by the streamlined De La Warr Pavilion (p4), completed around the same time less than 30 miles away in Bexhill by Mendelsohn and Chermayeff (although Benenden is delicate in comparison). Built of reinforced concrete with steel-framed windows and brick walls, the building is linear in form, bull-nosed on the east and two storeys high with an oversailing roof and terraces.

In effect, the building consists of two linear sections. On the south, uniformly-sized wards with a central bay are open to light and air through full-height glazing. Ground floor wards look on to a terrace, the upper ones on to a continuous balcony, its delicate balustrading reinforcing the building's strong horizontality. On the north, behind the light transparent wards, an opaque spine of service accommodation runs on either side of the entrance and stair tower.

In the early 1950s, the Lister was extended to the west by the addition of the Williams wing, which was intended as a copy of the original, but badly built with inferior detailing. The junction of the two buildings was marked by a clumsy tower. The wing's severe deterioration during the intervening years suggested its demolition and replacement by a new building, one that would house modern, properly equipped rooms for consultants, endoscopy and gynaecology procedures, and various ancillary services. At present, such functions are carried out in the main hospital building in dingy, sub-standard accommodation.

JMP's scheme demolishes the Williams wing and linking tower, and reinstates the western bull-nose of the Lister building, lost when the 1950s extension was built. Design of a new wing picks up the scale and crisp linearity of the original, while remaining independent of it; the fact that it is a new structure is lucidly expressed, by its clear independent aesthetic and by its being set well away to the west. But like the Lister, the building consists of two linear sections. On the south is a light, transparent procession of rooms for consultants and for patients waiting and recovering. The building's south face and sides are wrapped in a glass skin, shaded by louvres and animated by their rhythms. The north side of the building is formed by a heavier enclosed block, externally rendered, pierced by strip windows and containing procedure rooms, sterilization units, stairs and lift. Elegant, lightweight glazed enclosures at either end, with an internal stair wrapping around a vertical fin wall, respond without affectation to the delicate profile of the original 1937 building.

VOLUBILIS

MOROCCO

Passion and spontaneity prompted McAslan's plan to rescue another monument, the extraordinary Roman city of Volubilis in Morocco, from being submerged under a growing tide of visitors, and the important work of excavation from penury. The consequences of his visit to the site in 1998, and subsequent energies on its behalf have been new Anglo-Moroccan archaeological cooperation, and setting up (with Rita Bennis-Palmieri, owner of the famous Gazelle d'Or hotel in Taroudant) of a charitable trust which, among other things, sponsors training for young Moroccan conservators for Volubilis and other archaeological sites in Morocco. JMP has designed an Interpretation Centre, with visitor facilities, as well as education and research accommodation, an amenity the site presently lacks.

With its great triumphal arch and columns rising out of a mountain-fringed plain, the ruined city is one of North Africa's most important and romantic archaeological sites. Accorded World Heritage status, it lies 50km west of Fez and was founded in pre-Roman times. By the second and third centuries, Roman Volubilis was a wealthy city of some 20 000 inhabitants, producing fine bronzes, exporting wheat and olive oil to Rome, and supplying wild animals for gladiatorial games. Archaeological work began in the late nineteenth century, but it is now being boosted by a new Anglo-Moroccan excavation programme, Archaeologists from University College London and Rabat's Archaeological Institute have begun to explore the site further and, for the first time, the rare remains of an Islamic city found on the banks of the river to the south-west of Volubilis.

As well as providing vital research and conservation facilities, JMP's new centre will also contain education spaces, stores and workshops to house the site's treasures, together with offices, a public exhibition space, bookshop, and cafe. About 100 000 people visit the site annually and numbers are expected to rise. Two storeys high, the centre is located on an east ridge overlooking the Roman remains, providing the site with a facility to match its cultural significance.

78 DERNGATE

NORTHAMPTON

In something of an architectural flush -- having buildings by Mendelsohn (p4) and Wright (p30) to its credit -- the practice is designing a new arts centre in Northampton, which has at its core Charles Rennie Mackintosh's last completed work. It was the conversion in 1916 of an early nineteenth-century terraced house at 78 Derngate, for the toy-maker and art patron, W.J. Bassett-Lowke.

JMP's commission, from Northampton Borough Council and the 78 Derngate Trust, is to restore the Mackintosh house and convert the adjoining terrace property at No 80 into a visitors' centre. The interior of the narrow three-storeyed house at No 80 will be scooped out to create long galleries on the upper floors linked by a new staircase.

In his conversion, Mackintosh left the front facade intact, but completely reworked the rear garden elevation into a striking composition of rendered bays and terraces, a harbinger of modemity. Inside, the staircase was moved so that it rises between front and back rooms. An open screen of geometric leaded lights was inserted between the stairs and front room, the arrangement yielding an open hall/sitting room for visitors, and a secluded family room behind. From basement to attic, the house was designed down to its last detail: from the hand-stencilled walls, wallpapers and latticed panelling, to curtains and carpets, fitted furniture, china and cuboid planters.

Designed during Mackintosh's Chelsea years, the house is the only one of his works to have been built outside Scotland. 'It's dark and mysterious', says McAslan. 'In its tonal quality and geometrical decoration, it's far removed from the light and airy interiors he designed 15 years previously.' Bassett-Lowke himself was an exceptional client. Deeply involved in the planning and management of work on the house, he clearly regarded it as his project. He was an engineer by training, had spent time in an architect's office after leaving school, and knew what he wanted; he travelled much on business and was unusually well informed about contemporary European developments in architecture and design. It is said that his taste was austere and Germanic' and that, if he did not design some of the furniture, many pieces were made to his specification. His relationship with Mackintosh was as a collaborator. In 1926 the house was sold. Overtime, the contents became dispersed and the interior submerged by later decorations.

The task of restoring the house, its decorative elements and furniture is an important, complex and highly specialized one of conservation. With the help of the Hill House and Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, working with researchers and conservators, and from documents and old photographs, Sarah Jackson, JMP's architectural historian, and architect Ruth Miller are gradually putting the house together again. Original finishes are being matched, and firms found to replicate a number of original Derngate's furniture, lighting and other fittings, although the practice is committed to ensuring the minimum use of facsimile reproductions.

Some parts of the task are more straightforward than others: the Hunterian Museum, for instance, possesses original guest-room furniture which can be faithfully replicated. For security reasons, the visitors' centre next door will provide entrance and exit to the house. Visitors will enter the ground level of No 78, via No 80, move through the building to the third floor attic, step back into No 80 and the uppermost gallery, and descend through exhibition spaces to the exit. Planning and listed building consent has been secured, together with a Heritage Lottery grant, and the centre is due to open in 2003.

TRINITY COLLEGE, THE ROUNDHOUSE and ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC (LONDON)

Just completed are schemes for two of London's august schools of music -- Trinity College, and the Royal Academy of Music (p52). Both needed more space and 'reorganization, and are heavy with the weight of heritage. The design of a third music school, for the Welsh College of Music and Drama in Bute Park, Cardiff has just begun.

For Trinity College of Music the practice has been restoring and remodelling King Charles Court at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. Within a World Heritage site, Grade I listed and a scheduled Ancient Monument, the building was constructed over a hundred year period, beginning in 1664, by architects including Wren, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh. JMP's sensitive work on and with the building, as well as its robust attitude to intervention, gives Trinity a clear identity, new life and order. Throughout the project, the practice worked closely with advisors from English Heritage, who essentially became part of the design team, and with Wates, the project's contractor.

The conservatoire was founded over 130 years ago by Father Bonavia Hunt, a visionary Maltese deric and musician. His concern was that music should not be the pursuit of a privileged few but be placed at the heart of society, to be part of people's lives with other art forms. First housed in Weymouth Street in Marylebone, Trinity quickly outgrew its premises and moved into Lillie Langtry's house nearby in Mandeville Place, where it remained until the move to Greenwich.

King Charles Court had not been touched for 30 years. The building suffered a fire in the 1930s and bomb damage in the Second World War. These injuries together with the cavalier attitude of its previous occupant the Royal Navy, meant its condition varied a good deal. Unrestricted by preservation orders, the Navy had enjoyed carte blanche to alter the building as it wanted. 'Let's say it didn't fully understand the building', observes JMP's project architect. James Macauley. 'We found partitions jammed up to antique cornices. Really, it was a matter of clawing the building back.'

King Charles Court consists of four main floors built around a long narrow courtyard. Initially, the task was to understand the relative merits of its historic fabric, leading to the development of an acceptable balance between restoration, repair and intervention. During initial stages on site, accretions were stripped out, floors were lifted (on the ground floor, revealing archaeological relics) and strengthened where necessary; the west wing, found to contain asbestos, was decontaminated, When work began on a new attic library (the Jerwood Library of Performing Arts), the contractors found original palace beams dating from 1660, Once of new green oak, they have become stronger and harder and have been left bare to reveal the carpenters positioning marks and numbers. With the permission of English Heritage, a lift large enough to take a Steinway B piano was installed.

Other finds included Wren's adaptation of the original palace plans to make a hospital, with living quarters at one end and wards running along the main ranges. The living quarters have been turned into accommodation for student services and Junior Trinity suites: and Wren's wards have become corridors of practice and teaching spaces. The east wing of the building contains the largest public rooms, Classically arranged in an elegant procession, they include a vaulted stone loggia and the former Naval College library--a handsome room which, with the removal of the library to the attic, has been renamed the Peacock Room by Trinity's flamboyant principal Gavin Henderson. These volumes have been restored and redecorated, and, given new sprung floors of oak, have been retained as public performance and rehearsal rooms.

Altogether, Trinity required 100 practice rooms and a modem recording studio. Of the practice rooms, 70 had to be soundproofed so that noise from one did not leak to its neighbours. Percussion posed particular problems. JMP's answer was highly acoustically insulated capsule rooms, force ventilated and with massive doors inserted as secondary structures into existing rooms in the west wing. They are entered off long vaulted corridors running the length of the building on each floor. As is characteristic of the practice, such interventions are expressed as new structures, made manifestly separate in materials, and alignment, so that the precious historic building retains its integrity.

Colour has been used to denote separation and order within the building: deep red for music making, canary yellow for management, and deep blue for washrooms. In the same way, new lighting (some volumes requiring illumination are of heroic proportions) and other services, are surface mounted. This is in accordance with English Heritage which sought all insertions to be capable of removal if necessary, a requirement which has informed JMP's approach which legibly articulates new from old. If Trinity has gained new life, order and delight from being moved to Greenwich, then so has the building from its new tenants.

'One of the most intriguing aspects of each of the conservatoire projects is the quite different character and personalities of their principals, Curtis Price at the Royal Academy, Gavin Henderson at Trinity and Edmund Fivet at the Welsh College,' says McAslan. 'They've each, in their own way, pulled off major projects which transform both their physical and cultural environments.

In Chalk Farm Road in north London, JMP has been working on regenerating another much-loved landmark The Roundhouse. Designed by George Stephenson and Robert Dockray in 1846, it began life as an engine shed -- a magnificent undercroft surmounted by a great brick drum within which the engines were housed. Imbued with tough, industrial dignity, the building is regarded as an outstanding example of early railway architecture and listed Grade II (*). Only twenty years after its construction, the Roundhouse was redundant and in retrospect it seems miraculous it was not pulled down. Various uses found over the years for the building were all eventually abandoned; from being a gin warehouse, it became, during the great explosions of youth in the late 1960s and 1970s, a favourite venue for alternative theatre and rock concerts, its tough aesthetic seeming in sympathy with new creative expression. Later, it provided space for installation art.

In late 1998, McAslan was asked by the philanthropist Torquil Norman, to develop proposals to transform the Roundhouse into a living, vibrant performing arts centre, principally for young people, with a performance space for music, drama and dance. JMP's scheme repairs the historic structure, clears away unnecessary accretions, and tums the building's undercroft -- a magical place of radiating arches and clearings -- into the young people's centre with training spaces for music, TV, fashion and theatre.

The brick drum, where main performances will take place, will accommodate audiences of about 650 people seated, and up to 3500 standing. Enhancement of the space includes installing new building services, proper acoustics, and performance-related technical equipment As in Florida, JMP's sensitivity towards historical structure is balanced by directness, the desire to articulate new from old and delineate, in Kahnian manner, the servant spaces. Here, working with the uncompromisingly industrial spirit of The Roundhouse, the firms interventions will not be disguised -- principally consisting of a new sweep of galleria and public space external to the existing building -- and the dignity of the old building can be left intact Funding is being shared between the Norman Trust, the Arts Council of England, the Heritage Lottery Fund and private sponsors. Work has just begun on site and is set to be finished by 2004, with the Roundhouse becoming a key cultural centre for London and beyond. Founded in 1822, the Royal Academy of Music is one of the world's most celebrated musical conservatoires, With its gradual growth and increase in student numbers, it had outgrown its original premises, in a 1911 building by Ernest George on Marylebone Road. The Academy's acquisition, in 1997, of the neighbouring Grade I listed terrace by John Nash on York Gate was the opportunity to create an architecturally coherent school and public identity. The site, at the monumental gateway to Regent's Park, is part of Nash's grand plan of 1793 for the park and Regent Street.

McAslan's scheme, based on its masterplan for the campus, involved adapting the Nash terrace to accommodate classrooms, studios and an instrument museum. Research revealed that very little of the original Nash building remained. Bomb damage and a crude 1960s conversion into offices had left only minor fragments of the original intact. Being of no particular architectural interest the later works allowed the practice freedom to reconfigure internal spaces and insert new services. The existing south core now accommodates the main public staircase and instrument lift to all floors. The museum occupies the ground and upper two floors of what were Nos 1 and 2 York Gate. Conceived as a living museum, McAslan enlisted the leading exhibit designer Ralph Appelbaum from New York to design a series of display rooms opening on to workshops where visitors can see how instruments are made and maintained.

The practice's masterstroke, in this most sensitive of sites, at the entrance to one of London's best-loved parks, is the very discreet insertion of a new barrel-vaulted concert hall. Distantly inspired by Pierre Chareau's studio for Robert Motherwell on Long Island, it is delicately poised between the Marylebone Road building and York Gate and is the focus of the scheme. Vaulted and 8m high, most of it is below ground and barely visible from a distance. A strip of ancillary spaces, for plant and stage access, runs along its west side. Externally, the barrel vault is covered in patinated zinc, emerging from the ground with a glazed facade to the south while, within, the precast vaulted roof is expressed, below and timber panelled perimeter walls. The hall, already heavily in demand, is highly adaptable and usable for up to a 90-piece orchestra, or for public concerts and performances.

Practice Profile

John McAslan and Partners studio-based practice consists of 50 people - 45 in London and 5 in Manchester - many of whom have worked there since its inception. The studio model was provided by Cambridge 7, for which McAslan trained during his formative years as an architect in America in 1978-80, though given his admiration for Louis Kahn, it is tempting to see it as a human version the Kahnian plan, integrated yet cellular and capable of flexibility. Physically, the open space of the McAslan studio where a comprehensible number of people can an communicate with each other, face to face, without being crowded, promotes the team's integration; but at the same time, the practice embraces separate specializations including landscaping, environmental engineering, film- and video-making, industrial design and publishing (JMP publishes a thoughtful and elegantly produced practice journal edited by partner Murray Smith).

Problems inherent in managing the practice, in ensuring consistent quality while encouraging the talents of colleagues, in finding the time and energy to discuss the minute details which can transform a mundane piece of work, are tackled by all practice principals. McAslan appears to face them with great energy and humour - 'I do have a very good team of people' - and the only evidence of hierarchy in the Kensington Church Street studio is a small cubicle, on occasion occupied by McAslan (and shared with the practice's extensive slide and image library), behind a long storage bay, affectionately called Hadrian's Wall. 'It was built either to keep me in my cubicle or out of the studio, maybe both', says McAslan.

What holds the practice together is his palpable energetic passion for the art of architecture, and for the heroic radicalism of those early Modemists. Such passion forms the connective tissue. But if JMP's approach is underpinned by a sense of history, it is allied with keen recognition of the possibilities presented by modern technology and willingness to take advantage of them. As a unit, its versatility is impressive, manifest in an ability to cope imaginatively with changes in scale and to respond to ensuing social and architectural complexities - not an ability to be taken for granted. To observers of its progress over the past five years, the team has exhibited a growing self-confidence and reputation, independence of thought and enlightened professionalism that many must envy.