Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Architect of the National Theatre.
On the island
Eight records
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:29Could you adjust yourself to solitude on this island?
I think I'd find it very difficult. I'm so used to talking things over with particularly my wife. I think I w yes, I would find it very difficult.
Presenter asks
4:28When did you start taking an interest in design and in buildings?
So far as design is concerned, I I I'm very much I had my eyes opened by my art master at Rugby, Tolbukele, who's a very good painter of birds.
Presenter asks
5:33What was the first building of which you could say, 'That's mine'?
Well, it's a fairly disgusting little building. It was a little house that I did for a young married couple while I was a second-year student. I met them at a party and they were moaning they couldn't find a house and I rather rashly said, well, why not build one? I'll build you one. And I got a letter the next day offering me £50 to design them a house, which I did. I bought a second-hand Austin 7 and I went down from London to Esha every morning at 6 to supervise the building of this house. And then I got back to the AA for my studies by 10 o'clock. And it still stands, but I can't... It's all mine, but I'm not terribly proud of it.
The keepsakes
The book
Not recorded.
Presenter asks
9:23What happened to your horse eventually?
Well, he stuck his head out of a three-ton truck straight into the face of the military police and he was uh confiscated and I never saw him again.
Presenter asks
14:01What was the thinking behind having three auditoriums in the one building? Wasn't that an extravagance?
Well, originally the brief said let's have an adaptable theatre that can do everything. An all-purpose theatre. An all-purpose. Well, you see, all-purpose things, as we all know, never do anything properly. And there are three theatres for, I think, very sound reasons. The National Theatre has to offer the public what the mainstream of Greek and Elizabethan drama had to offer. That's an open sort of stage. It has to offer a spatial relationship which is called a proscenium stage for which playwrights of the last 300 years have written and will continue to write. So that's two theatres. And like any big organization, it must have an eye to its future for young playwrights, young designers, young directors to be able to experiment without being thrust into a big auditorium in a small studio theatre, so you have to have three theatres.
Presenter asks
23:18If you could take only one disc of the eight, which would it be?
I think I'd take the Mozart.
“as Goethe said, I or somebody said it, architecture is frozen music”
“I think I'd find it very difficult. I'm so used to talking things over with particularly my wife.”
“I bought a second-hand Austin 7 and I went down from London to Esha every morning at 6 to supervise the building of this house.”
“And that horse travelled with me right through the next nine months.”
“The whole point of theatre is that it should be small. Intimate.”