Today, 4 July, marks the anniversary of Bryan Avery’s death.
I think of him with enormous affection.
Bryan was a brilliant man: great company, wickedly funny, and possessed of a gigantic intellect which he wore without vanity. He could have overwhelmed people with what he knew, but instead he gave it away generously. Conversation with him was never small. It could begin with a building, pass through geometry, aircraft, cities, landscape, a drawing, a joke, and end somewhere completely unexpected, with the feeling that architecture had become larger, stranger, more serious and more pleasurable than it had been an hour before.
He was loved because he was not only clever. He was warm. He was curious. He was generous with attention, with knowledge, with friendship. He made architecture feel like a shared pursuit.
I had the privilege of photographing Repton School’s 400 Hall Theatre for him.
It is a building that says a great deal about Bryan. Not through device or conceit, but through intelligence. The project takes the existing 1950s theatre hall and gives it new life, placing a flexible auditorium inside the retained brick shell, while setting a new glazed foyer to the side as a precise and luminous counterpoint. The old façade is not bullied into modernity. It is respected, repaired and allowed to continue.
The foyer is set at an angle, catching the picturesque irregularity of the school campus and the diagonal relationship between the Hall, the Chapel, the Arch and Old School beyond. Its order comes from equilateral triangles and from a human measure: eye height, doubled into ceiling height, extended into glass, wall, roof and plan. That was Bryan. A thought would become a proportion; a proportion would become a room; a room would become an experience.
Photographing it required a kind of restraint. This was during my “no Photoshop” period, when I was trying to make digital architectural photography behave with the discipline and tonal gravity of large-format transparency film. The images were made on large-format equipment with a Phase One digital back, and were intended to sit close to the contrast, colour and clarity of transparency stock: composed in camera, dependent on the light, with as little post-production intervention as possible.
That approach suited the building, and it suited Bryan. He would have understood the morality of it: the refusal to rescue an image afterwards, the need to stand in the right place, wait for the right light, and let the building disclose itself through proportion, material and atmosphere.
Bryan’s work was often described through technology, geometry and systems of thought, but what I remember most is the humanity of it all. His buildings were intelligent because he was intelligent, but they were also generous because he was generous. They made room for people, for conversation, for delight, for the social life of architecture.
Bryan died on 4 July 2017. He is still greatly missed.
