Around and About Stock Orchard Street

Stock Orchard Street is one of those wild and influential projects in architecture that, just occasionally, re-direct our thinking. This book, that delves into the messiness of building, Renaissance ethics, contextual design and feminist materiality, is as exploratory, incidental, argumentative, open, polemical and enjoyable as the building itself. It celebrates the magical tension between us, our built environment and our notions of how that environment should be. - Kevin McCloud, author, broadcaster and designer Like the house it assesses and celebrates, Around and About Stock Orchard Street is a one-off, a sum that is greater than its eclectic, eccentric, inventive parts. Touring the views presented by the house's makers and admirers is, in its way, as enjoyable as touring the house itself, and reminds us of what we still lack in any abundance in British architecture: a poetics of the 'hairy'. - Susannah Hagan, Professor of Urban Studies, University of Brighton A tale of architecture getting back to its roots, reminding us, as we plough through our latest client's crippling appointment document, of all the resons why we strove to become architects, and giving clues as to how we might once again stick our necks out and the benefits of doing so to architecture. - Sean Griffiths, Building Design This is a significant and engaging type of book about architectural practice that captures well the complexity of issues that influence on the design and construction process of the building...As a whole I hope that the book will serve as a blueprint for a new kind of writing on architecture that helps to open up the profession to a much wider public audience. - Dr. Jan Kattein, The Journal of Space Syntax