I'm going to talk about four projects. Their theme is education because they're all projects for educational institutions or organisations. But in a sense that theme is a sub-theme because what I'm going to talk about are ideas and the power of ideas which are outside the obvious description of the architectural problem or the brief for each of these buildings. To some extent these are historical ideas and to some extent they're rather unexpected. But in each case they're formative. The first project is the Sainsbury Building which is an undergraduate building, residential building for Worcester College, Oxford. Worcester College stands on the end of Beaumont Street and it does something very important for a piece of architecture. It forms a kind of threshold between the City of Oxford and the magic gardens of Worcester College which you discover when you penetrate through this threshold, through a courtyard underneath a loggia and find yourself looking out across a raised quadrangle towards trees.

And subsequently, when you walk through that quadrangle and out through a gap in the medieval buildings on one side, you find yourself actually in a magic park, and find yourself alongside a lake which leads you, rather like a river, to its other end where our new building stands. And it seemed to me that it was possible to make a piece of clearly late 20th century architecture which was nevertheless deeply affected by these essentially 18th century ideas. The building stands at the end of the lake but, in the idiom of lakes in the English picturesque tradition, a lake is rather like a river and a river cannot be seen to end. It must either disappear into foliage, and it mustn't be seen to begin unless it begins with a source. And this is a theme in many lakes in English 18th century gardens. They start with a grotto for example.