Anyone who studied or tutored during the 80s and 90s would get a feeling of timewarp about Surface Architects' Lockkeeper's Cottage building for Queen Mary, University of London in the East End. It's as though at least half a decade - of irony, wit, doubletake, of arthouse appropriation of the everyday; of the new commercial baroque - never happened. This well-realised little project seems to have passed through the zeros without touching the sides. But between the 80s and 80s revival, the world has changed. Queen Mary has the context and commissioning we only dreamed of 20 years ago. It's next to the CZWG green bridge over the Mile End Road, has a decent Sheppard Robson building, a student village by Feilden Clegg Bradley, and now, beside the Regents Canal, this 'gem' postgraduate centre to attract research students. It is a period piece: both of its own time and the era from which it emerged. This becomes obvious in the language Surface uses. Opening by explaining how they retained the 19th century cottage but demolished the pumping house, Andy McFee and Richard Scott launch into descriptions of wing, the tendril, characters, vectors and radical breaking of volumes. The 80s mi never have gone away.
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