Tony Fretton is a great architect. His work began to attract international critical attention in the early 1990s with the construction of the idiosyncratic Lisson Gallery building in London, the city where he has his architectural practice, whose works quickly expanded outside England. The Lisson Gallery proposed, in an absolute counter-current, a new way of exhibiting contemporary art through an urban construction, almost indistinct from the morphological fabric that surrounds it, which, however, served to confer it a very distinct meaning. Taking advantage of the volumetric irregularity of its surroundings, he mimicked the surrounding fragmentation in a single plane and absorbed the richness of this same variability, submitting it to his own experimentalism. This is not for everyone.
Other iconic works followed, such as the majestic Red House in the Chelsea neighbourhood, whose Renaissance resonance I was privileged to witness and feel on a beautiful London morning, when I interviewed our guest for a book in the series “Band à Part” that I have just written, about three superlative works of contemporary architecture, in which the Lisson Gallery is an agent. Or, the magnificent Fulsgang Museum, built in Southern Denmark, an architectural exercise in perfect balance between classicism and contemporaneity, atmospheric contextualism and formal precision. In my opinion, timelessness, that most difficult condition of a major architectural work, is the fairest way to classify his vast work, whose talent is also revealed in the ease and naturalness with which he faces an impressive diversity of programmes and scales. In addition to the work that has been built, Tony Fretton, like all great architects, bases his mental work on an enlightened and selective referential, inhabited by the great masters of modernism (Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto and Louis Kahn), Soviet constructivism, Nordics such as Peter Celsing and Sigurd Lewerentz, anonymous British and Italian classicism and the contemporary Álvaro Siza, with whom he shares a taste for sketch drawing, whose usefulness is fundamental to the conception of his architecture. This theoretical vocation of his was recently compiled in the publication “Articles, Essays, Interviews and out-takes”. With a writing that moves away from the boring and sterile scientific articles, he speaks of Architecture in a simple, direct, and passionate way. His work has been regularly published by the main international reference editions, in particular monographs by Gustavo Gili, Quart Verlag and Birkhauser from Zurich, and in his curriculum as an educator he has attended the ETH Zurich, the GSD Harvard in Cambridge, the EPFL in Lausanne, the Technical University of Delft, the Architectural Association in London, and the Berlage Institut in the Netherlands, among others.
It was a great honor for me to present one of the European architects by whom I have the deepest fascination and admiration. I think we all agree that we are very privileged to have the architect Tony Fretton with us to close seminar 2 of option E of the PDA (PHD), Theory and Practice of Design. Thank you very much.
Nuno Brandão Costa, junho de 2023