Radiant House

My fascination with rocks, minerals and fossils began almost by chance some five years ago when I scanned a large ammonite. But chance is rarely as random as it seems.
When I built Radiant House at the FutureWorld exhibition in Milton Keynes in 1994, I conceived the design as a ‘brick-walled garden’ made habitable by a plywood aerofoil roof that had, so to speak, ‘flown in’ from Finland, its airborne character emphasised by floating its 5.5 tonnes on structural glass – a challenge magnificently met by the engineer Mark Lovell. The site is underlain by the Oxford Clays seams and to emphasise the connection between the handmade bricks and clay I decided to visit the brickworks and press replicas of ammonites found in the Oxford Clays into a few bricks – leading some visitors to say that they hadn’t realised fossils were found in bricks!
Friends were convinced the house would prove unsaleable: who would live in a house held up by glass?, they asked. Well, it sold, and re-sold, in less than two weeks each time, and now I’ve received an email out of the blue from a couple who said they ‘fell in love’ with the house at the exhibition and think that they might finally have the resources to commission a new one. I’m hoping they have, because we can not only refine the design but also, thanks to the earth images and digital manufacturing, make the tiles I dreamt of for the bathrooms. Whereas the impressed ammonites tie the walls to the earth below, the bathrooms will be altogether more ‘cosmic’, places to ponder what lies beyond the vaulted sky.