A Building Study - Women’s Institute

IT’S A BIT LIKE DISCOVERING
AN ANCIENT FOSSIL. YOU STILL
SEE THE ORIGINAL ANIMAL
BUT ITS EVERY PART HAS
BEEN REPLACED

Not quite making a silk purse from a sow’s ear, Jonathan Ellis-Miller can nevertheless take credit for turning a former pig shed into the RIBA Award-winning headquarters of the Cambridge Federation of Women’s Institutes. The project may be small but it could nevertheless have major ramifications for both architect and client.

Until winning a RIBA Award for this very building, ellismiller was one of those practices I had heard of but could not quite place. It is headed by Jonathan Ellis-Miller, a Liverpool School graduate who, before setting up his own practice in 1992, spent six years with John Winter. For many, John Winter will also be someone you have heard of but can’t quite place; but he was there at the start of the British High-Tech movement — in the US, when Rogers, Foster, Stirling and so many others were imbibing a heady cocktail of fast-track construction, a can-do attitude and the patronage of a wealthy and cultured elite that wanted to express itself through the medium of architecture.

Into this rich mix there came a vision of a new architecture. In California in the 1940s and ’50s a government drive to prefabricate affordable homes was taken up by Arts & Architecture magazine and became the now famous Case Study Houses programme. The (largely) single-storey, lightweight houses with exposed structure and full-height glazing by the likes of Eames, Ellwood and Koenig were enormously influential on British architects such as Rogers, Hopkins, Manser — and John Winter.

His house had (for 1969) a rather daring, headline-catching Corten cladding too.

Small wonder then that the young Ellis-Miller, on setting up practice, designed and built his own house — an elegant white-framed essay in the lightweight steel tradition. There then followed a number of small but important commissions of this type.

Original article can be viewed here.