Rick Mather (1937-2013), an American-born, London-based architect, is acknowledged as one of the leading architects of his generation. Yet the relevance of his work for the challenges of our age remains little-known, and his innovative work on environmental efficiencies, adaptive re-use, socially driven design and groundbreaking advances in glass technologies can remain hidden under the stylish surface of his well-published spaces. 

This is the first comprehensive overview of his work, drawing on Mather’s personal archives, the accounts of colleagues, friends, clients and building users, as well as the remaining built works, to open up new interpretations of architecture which sometimes puzzled the style-driven culture of the times. 

The book shows how his best-known projects: his major museum adaptations, including the Ashmolean in Oxford, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Dulwich Picture Gallery, his dramatic chain of Chinese restaurants, his quiet, economical and environmentally proactive university projects, masterplans like the South Bank and the houses he had been designing from childhood, all interacted in a practice conjuring ‘new’ spaces from unlikely settings. These always optimised landscape, urban and social contexts, and ambitiously demonstrated just how much more we can do with less.