At the time of this talk Stephen Hodder was a Nottingham-born young English rising star of second-generation Modernism, trained at Manchester School of Architecture in the mid-1970s. On graduating, he worked in Building Design Partnership's Preston office, but left after two years to set up his own practice in 1983 in Manchester.
Seven years later he won a competition for a swimming pool in Colne, which gained the RFAC/Sunday Times Award in 1992. Since then he has not ceased to be in the public eye, winning one architectural competition after another, as well as the coveted Stirling Prize in 1966 for his Centenary Building at the University of Salford.
But it was the extension he designed for St Catherine's College in Oxford that put the seal on his capability. St Catherine's was the Arne Jacobsen masterpiece, about which Reyner Banham had written that "absolute architectural morality prevails" allowing "no room for growth". Hodder's exquisite complementary solution disproved this.
His recorded talk, he says, is about his search for an extension or transformation of the modern tradition, and he uses three of his designs to illustrate his approach.
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