A House is a Machine for Living in

You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces.

Clare House, Bow, Tower Hamlets, E9

That is construction. Ingenuity is at work.

Marble Hill House, Richmond Road, Twickenham, TW1

But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: “This is beautiful.”

Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's Barbican Estate, Barbican, City of London, EC1A

That is Architecture. Art enters in.

Dolls House, Hollytrees Museum, Colchester, Essex, CO1

From Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture (1923)

Nicholas Hawksmoor

For when I trace back the years I have liv’d, gathering them up in my Memory…

Nichoas Hawksmoor's Christchurch Spitalfields, Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets, E1

… I see what a chequer’d Work Of Nature my life has been.

Nicholas Hawksmoor's St Mary Woolnoth, Lombard Street, City of London, EC3V

If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it)…

Nicholas Hawksmoor's St Anne's Limehouse, Limehouse, Tower Hamlets, E14

… I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them…

Nicholas Hawksmoor's St George-in-the-East, Shadwell, Tower Hamlets, E1

… but I cannot help their Unbelief…

Nicholas Hawksmoor's St George's Bloomsbury, Little Russell Street, Camden, WC1A

… and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse.

Nicholas Hawksmoor's St Alfege, St Alfege Passage, Greenwich, SE10

From Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985)

Ernö Goldfinger

Even his friends acknowledge that the real Goldfinger could be something of a bully – albeit a charming one.

Ernö Goldfinger's Balfron Tower, St Leonard's Road, Poplar, Tower Hamlets, E1

But he was no villain.

Ernö Goldfinger's 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, Camden, NW3

Indeed he emerging as a hero of modernist architecture despite being described as being ‘no more than a pimple on the rump of Wren’ by Brian Sewell…

Ernö Goldfinger's 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, Camden, NW3

…and one of his best-known buildings, Trellick Tower, being disparaged by Roger Scruton as embodying a ‘contemptuous conception of life’s value’.

Ernö Goldfinger's 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, Camden, NW3

Though Sewell and Scruton might find support from Prince Charles (in later years Goldfinger kept a caricature of Prince Charles pinned to the wall of his study)…

Ernö Goldfinger's 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, Camden, NW3

…most of those who have lived in a building designed by Goldfinger know that his success as an architect goes far beyond creating external forms which are pleasing (or, to some, repellent) to the eye of architectural historians.

Ernö Goldfinger's Trellick Tower, Golborne Road, North Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea, W10

From Nigel Warburton’s Ernö Goldfinger: The Life of an Architect (2003)