An active interest in the nature tradition as a living, evolving phenomenon, has run like a golden thread through the unusually broad career of architect and urban designer Hugh Petter, a director of ADAM Architecture.

In this lecture Hugh will draw upon his academic research and the varied project work published in his recent monograph, Living Tradition, to lay out how, he believes, the past has so much to teach us as we wrestle with contemporary design problems. He will explain how we can produce new buildings that are elegant, enduring and highly sustainable, and which also sit comfortably alongside their older neighbours and landscape settings to create beautiful, harmonious places.

Hugh will reveal how he is helping to pioneer new, collaborative ways of working with landowners and developers, adopting a coherent common design language rooted in vernacular traditions to conceive and deliver elegant new commercial urban development that reinforces local character and cultural identity in ways that are at once familiar, popular and enduring. He will demonstrate too how such an approach to development can embrace social inclusiveness and build civilised communities whilst creating a significant long term economic premium and, most importantly, enabling the residents to live low carbon lives.

Hugh Petter is an architect and master-planner with a profound and wide-ranging interest in traditional architecture and contextual urbanism. He is a director of ADAM Architecture who employ a team of over 160 people. His diverse project portfolio includes new town and country houses: conversion, renovation, and extensions to listed buildings; commercial, retail, sports venue and tertiary education projects, and masterplans for mixed use developments for private, institutional, and local authority landowners.

Hugh won Rome Scholarships in 1990 and 1991. He helped establish the Foundation Course at The Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture, and has served as trustee and vice chairman of the Georgian Group; trustee of The Prince’s Foundation, and trustee and Chairman of the Art Workers Guild. He has written numerous articles and essays and teaches regularly.

A monograph, Living Tradition, The Architecture and Urbanism of Hugh Petter, was published in October 2023.

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Free for members, £5 plus booking fee for non-members.