Demetri Porphyrios invited me to contribute the foreword to King’s Cross: The Making of a Master Plan which describes a 67-acre urban development of disused railway lands in central London. The planners were Porphyrios Associates and Allies & Morrison. The project, which was a finalist for this year’s Stirling Prize, includes buildings designed by David Chipperfield, BIG, Heatherwick Studio, Maki & Associates, Porphyrios, Wilkinson Eyre, As I wrote, King’s Cross is “an important landmark in the longstanding debate between modernists and traditionalists . . . and answers the question of whether it is possible to combine traditional urbanism and contemporary architecture with an emphatic ‘Yes’.”
