a+t architecture publishers

...Fretton’s is a singular voice in both Britain and Europe, hard to place: his work, a compelling mix of bravura and understatement, discipline and detachment, didacticism and empathy. However his command of what he calls ‘the affecting power of forms’ is powerful precisely because it is allied to his spatial understanding, of the routines and habits which demarcate our individual and common lives, and of how these are embodied in places made specific by idiosyncrasies and histories...

...The opposition to the ‘formal way’, proclaimed in the work of Tony Fretton is a totally conscious statement and can be seen as a personal, critical standpoint of everything that is excessively rigid, formal, solemn; of etiquette and conventions. A criticism made with irony and witty references, that keeps him sailing close to the wind, in an attitude which is more involuntary than desired, more spirited than meditated –the consequence of his interest in things...

...You clearly have a strong interest in how architecture is rooted in its surroundings, in a particular environment which is not architectural in the way most people understand it. In the early 1990’s, I and several other people were puzzled by the photographs which you took of London. How were these photographs taken, and for what purpose?
They came about because a group of people at the AA including Matthias Sauerbruck organized an exhibition for which the site was Earl’s Court in West London. I just walked around and did some psychogeography. I looked at what interested me and photographed it. I chose the few images which interested me and re-took some of them. By doing so, I found a purpose in looking...