Since I was an undergraduate in LMU’s architecture school, Ellis Woodman’s excellent building reviews have been just as invaluable a part of my architectural education as the formal tuition was then.

London Metropolitan University, ARU

Looking down the length of the boulevard, large sliding doors allow lectures to spill out from crit spaces.

He continues to help me to “see” architecture, to understand it, and to discriminate. In his review of ARU’s work at the Cass faculty (Buildings January 11), he has excelled himself.
Where I would have just seen a kickplate that was six inches too short, he observes that “the kickplate declines to make its customary journey from one side of the door to the other. It is a composition in which every part guards a sense of its own identity rather than allowing itself to be subsumed into a systematic expression.” Magnificent!

PS The headline “Chipperfield in pub brawl” (News January 25) was one of your best ever. Long may you continue to lower the tone of architectural debate.

Jeff Lucas
Bristol

Williamstrip Bath house, Gloucestershire by Craig Hamilton Architects

Source: Paul Highnam

View down the pool towards the spa.

Poetry corner

The pool room at Williamstrip looks like a hippo

(Some of the details are hard to swallow).

Suited perhaps, to a watering hole

Designed so the idle rich can wallow.

Martin Valatin
Bradford on Avon