A monograph on the life and work of architect Rick Mather explores his approach and impact

The late American architect Rick Mather (1937-2013) called London home for many decades. This new monograph about his life and work charts his path towards designing some of the UK’s most significant cultural projects, although since his death his profile has remained determinedly more low-key than many of his surviving contemporaries.

Born in Portland, Mather came to the UK in 1963, working first at the firm of Lyons Israel Ellis. One of the more successful exponents of Brutalism, LIE had an impressive roster of alumni, including James Stirling, James Gowan, Alan Colquhoun, John Miller; Neave Brown and Richard MacCormac, all of whom, like Mather, went on to set up era-defining modernist-infused practices.

Mather’s own firm was started in 1973, after a hitherto little-known spell toiling in Southwark's architecture department, back in the days when councils had such a thing in house. He also worked for the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, becoming close with the organisation’s radical and influential coterie of young architects. Early projects included bookshops, homes and refurbishment works to the AA itself, along with unpublished schemes for Heaven nightclub in Charing Cross.

Mather’s commitment to modernist aesthetics was rarely tempered, but his projects were never oversized and grandiose. Instead, he worked on a succession of discretely luxurious private houses, including his own reworked Georgian townhouse in Camden with its spectacular roof garden (a lifelong passion) and the multiple award-winning Priory in Hampstead, a grand modern dwelling in the spirit of the area’s 1930s modernist villas.

In some respects, Mather’s white-walled ascetism seemed to align perfectly with the vogue for minimalism that permeated the retail and residential heart of upscale 80s and 90s London. His love of Le Corbusier’s sculptural idiosyncrasies was always in play, as were experiments in structural glass, but it was the careful and bravura fusion of the old and the new that gave his studio its most significant commissions.

Three major London works – the glass courtyards in the Wallace Collection and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and the new quadrangle at Dulwich Picture Gallery – were all completed between 1999 and 2000, cementing a well-deserved reputation for sympathetic but dynamic updates.

Other major projects include the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, the updated Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and Now and Zen, a cultish Covent Garden restaurant with a ‘dragon’ waterfall made from a cascade of glass bowls – somewhere that would have been perfectly at home in the Instagram era.

Written by the experienced architectural journalist and critic Kester Rattenbury, Rick Mather: The Complete Works is richly illustrated – Mather loved architectural draughtsmanship - and also evokes the spirit and atmosphere of 80s and 90s UK architecture culture.

Rick Mather: The Complete Works, Kester Rattenbury, Lund Humphries, £60, LundHumphries.com, RickMather.com