Newspaper Article

Architecture: Magic box: Tony Fretton's Faith House is low-key and low cost. But a few moments inside will change your life, says Jonathan Glancey

Glancey, Jonathan

2002

Overview

[Gunnar Asplund]'s secret lay in stripping classical architecture of its rich ornament and laying bare its satisfying geometry. He freed it from 19th-century pomposity while retaining its grave and silent profundity. Approaching [Tony Fretton]'s more modest temple, you feel much the same way. Asplund's late-flowering masterpiece, it turns out, has been a significant influence on Fretton in Dorset. The architect's belief is that such buildings should be an open book. Planned meticulously, Fretton's buildings never bully their users, who are invited to find their own ways through them. They are, he says, quoting a fellow architect's review of Faith House, \"in a positive sense, an 'emotional blank canvas': you take from them what you want\". They are unassuming. \"I would go to any length\", says Fretton, \"to avoid architecture as self-portraiture.\" \"For me,\" says Fretton, \"both the architecture of the past and present exists in the present, always revealing its radicalness and capacity to talk about the heart of the human experience.\" It was this sense of radical timelessness, and his love of art, that led Fretton to his most uncharacteristic commission to date, the handsome and costly red-stone house for Alex Sainsbury, an art collector, alongside the Thames at Chelsea. Sainsbury's mother is a key figure in the Post Green Community, and here in Dorset, Fretton has returned to the design of low-kew, low-cost buildings.

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Architecture / Design / Fretton, Tony