Written while listening to On the Nature of Daylight, by Max Richter. (Click to listen)
Dear Grandchild,
“Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes.”
This week the RIBA London Awards honoured our Public Courtyard and Pavilion at the Old War Office. You will remember me writing about the old stones of that courtyard some years ago when we were designing it, and how those stones touched my heart. Today, let me tell you about two men who lie now below stone, two men who have touched my life in different ways.
Your great-grandfather died a few days before I joined the RIBA award ceremonies for the first time in 2024. Our jury visit at St Andrew Holborn did not go smoothly. Confident we were not selected, I went to the ceremony out of basic courtesy. I waited as team after team went up. When I heard our studio called I found myself alone on a big bright stage in front of all of London’s architects, physically present but mentally and emotionally in a completely other place. Alone, without my team or client, but also more profoundly alone, without father.
I spent that whole evening in a heavy fog. Just one glimmer came through the haze, when Alison Brooks recognised me and came to congratulate me afterwards. Alison is a leading architect, deeply thoughtful, a celebrated winner of the Stirling Prize. She told me to enjoy this first award — the RIBA, she said, is the most meaningful recognition, because experts give it to one another for the quality of the work itself. Alison has the most crystalline, penetrating eyes, a kind of otherworldly grace about her manner and her form. I wish you could see her as she was that evening: you would understand how my heart might have lifted on hearing her encouraging words.
This week I was back, but circumstances couldn’t have been more different. This time I was with colleagues from the judging panel and with my own team. The feeling was not disorientation but a warm sense of belonging.
And yet, again there was a feeling of absence. My father, now gone for two years. And this year, G.P. Hinduja, my client, the owner of the Old War Office, who has also left us only a few months ago.
Our pavilion was a small piece of a much larger project. But G.P. always made me feel my role was important. It was he who said to me at the earliest stage of the work “show the world what you can do in our courtyard.”
He was one of the wealthiest people in the UK, overseeing vast business interests with his brothers. And yet, rather than making him seem less human, all of this success seemed to highlight even more his humanity. Perhaps part of his success was his ability to make every person he met, every work he did feel special, important, seen. Every letter I sent him came back with a thoughtful and energetic response. Every time we met face to face he would inject me with a little more of his trademark optimistic smile and energy.
My father was not a businessman. But he was one of the most accomplished research chemists in the world. Bodipy, the remarkable fluorescent dye he invented, became a foundational technology for the entire biotech industry. By the time he died he had more than forty patents, many of them on brass and wood plaques lining the bookshelves in his study. His talent took him around the world, from the backwaters of Buyeo*, to the University of Oregon, and ultimately to London.
And yet none of it would have happened without the encouragement of a single teacher. My father lost his own father early, and much of the time he should have been in school he was running around in the valleys around Buyeo, splashing in streams and apparently hardly able to read or write. It was just before the secondary school exams that a calligraphy teacher saw a special talent in him, teaching him the way of the brush.
This story is about small nudges that instil belief.
The RIBA awards recognise the continuing success of established practices. But ultimately, it is that small boost to emerging practices like ours that might make the biggest difference. I will always remember the words of Alison Brooks-that small encouragement in one of the darker moments of my life.
G.P. once told us he had to visit more than forty banks in London to get someone to lend him money for his first venture in the UK. Every single bank turned him down, save one. He never forgot the chance that bank took on him, and he was still telling that story, decades later.
My father never stopped learning. He read every work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky multiple times. He wrote out his favourite passages in his inimitably perfect penmanship, and we all still marvel at the beauty and precision of the words in the notebooks he left behind, sitting on the shelf next to the patents, awards, and histories.
* Buyeo, ancient capital of the Paekche Kingdom of Korea, where your great-grandfather was born. Of the three Kingdoms, Paekche was known for its internationally celebrated white celadon. In 660, Shilla conquered Paekche as it unified Korea into a single kingdom. Buyeo became a small village, but the memory of those artistic people remain.
