New book to offer the first comprehensive assessment of Rick Mather's enduring legacy.

Rick Mather (1937-2013), an American-born, London-based architect, is acknowledged as one of the leading architects of his generation. Yet the relevance of his work for the challenges of our age remains little-known, and his innovative work on environmental efficiencies, adaptive re-use, socially driven design and groundbreaking advances in glass technologies can remain hidden under the stylish surface of his well-published spaces.

This is the first comprehensive overview of his work, drawing on Mather's personal archives, the accounts of colleagues, friends, clients and building users, as well as the remaining built works, to open up new interpretations of architecture which sometimes puzzled the style-driven culture of the times.

The book shows how his best-known projects: his major museum adaptations, including the Ashmolean in Oxford, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Dulwich picture gallery, his dramatic chain of Chinese restaurants, his quiet, economical and environmentally proactive university projects, masterplans like the South Bank and the houses he had been designing from childhood, all interacted in a practice conjuring ‘new’ spaces from unlikely settings. These always optimised landscape, urban and social contexts, and ambitiously demonstrated just how much more we can do with less.

Commissioned by The Rick Mather Trust, and authored by award-winning writer Kester Rattenbury, the book will be available for purchase September 2026, available for pre order here.

Rick Mather Architects have been practicing in London since the early 1970s. Best known for their award winning museum extensions such as the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the National Maritime Museum, their portfolio spans a broad spectrum of projects from private residences to academic masterplans and urban design including both renovation and new building. They are world renowned for thier intuitive sense of place and context, as well as their pioneering technologies in structural glass and sustainable design.

The book establishes Rick Mather's unique approach to resolving complex design issues on both a large scale and in the ne details. The work of the practice is described in accessible terms through the texts and a wealth of visual material, including photography and drawings supplied by the practice. Alongside this documentation, the visual aspect is supplemented by the reproduced paintings, maps and drawings from a diverse range of sources, which have inspired and informed the work.

An American, who received his training at the University of Oregon, Mather moved to England at a time when American urban fabric was dissolving in a sea of business parks and freeways. London offered the attraction of life in a city with real metropolitan qualities and his architecture is a celebration of those older qualities; a rejection of the buildings as an isolated object. Nevertheless his buildings are all rooted in the calm purity of the vocabulary of Modernism.

Working in cities as diverse as London, Hong Kong, and Montreal, Mather works both at the scale of the individual house as well as the fice building or university. His domestic work is an ingenious exploration of high-density living, his restaurants are dazzling pieces of social stagecraft while his commercial projects address the issue of urbanity head on.

Part of the Architecture in Detail series, Zen Restaurants explores the partnership between Zen restaurants and Rick Mather in producing some of the world's nest restaurant interiors. Mather's designs eschew ethnic reference to establish a family group of cooly -considered dining environments.

John Welsh considers Mather's three London based restaurants - ZeNW3, Zen Central and Now & Zen - plus those in Hong Kong and Montreal.