A E I O U

Articles, Essays, Interviews and Out-takes

Tony Fretton

British architect Tony Fretton (b. 1945) is internationally recognized for both his critical writing about architecture and his building and design projects. His first major building project was the Lisson Gallery in London in 1990, and his most recent are two apartment towers in Antwerp Harbor and the City Hall in Deinze, Belgium. From 1999 to 2013, Fretton was a professor and chair of Architecture and Interiors at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He was also visiting professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design from 2005 to 2006.

A E I OU: Articles, Essays, Interviews and Out-takes is his new collection of writing from 1986 to 2017. The name itself says something of the nature of Fretton’s collected writing. As an architect, he has written that ”words, the most collective form of communication, thread their way through the projects, in explanations to clients and constructors, and as my means, along with drawings, of explaining the projects to my collaborators, to myself and to the wider world.” As a professor at TU Delft, he wrote that “Interior design accommodates people’s physical and emotional comfort and rituals of use directly in the material of buildings, and offers freedom, directness and social meaning to architecture.” Between these two professional poles lies a constellation of texts including essays on other architects and historical currents in architecture, interviews that lay out the bases of his practice and out-takes—ideas and phrases retrieved from early drafts and unpublished writing. The end result is a dynamic collection of texts.

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