Philip Steadman

Philip Steadman interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 10th February 2020

0:05:11 Born in Northwich, Cheshire, in 1942 to Dorothy and Fred Steadman; we were living in Northwich because my father was a chemical engineer; he worked for ICI at a factory making caustic soda; we lived in a village called Hartford, in Walnut Lane in a small house; later my father moved up in the works at Winnington and we moved to 'Walnut Lodge', which was the big house at the end of the lane, which had the walnuts as far as I can remember; I don't know where my father and mother met; my mother died when I was sixteen and I never talked to her about it when I was growing up, though I wish I had; they either met in Wakefield, Yorkshire, where they both grew up or they met at Oxford where my father read chemistry and my mother, English literature; most of my family came from Yorkshire; my father's father was a coal miner in Wakefield; I never met him as he died before I was born; my mother's father whose name I never knew, was always called "Pa", and I met him lots of times; he was a bookbinder and worked in a printing works that made ledgers and account books, and I went to see that with him; my father wrote a little memoir for us, possibly to publication, so I learnt more about his life before I was born, and I have been looking at it again more recently; in my grandfather's house there were some books, and some music I think; my father got to grammar school at Wakefield which he describes in the 1930s where the teaching was rather dilatory though one might have imagined it was rather academic; you could learn if you wanted to, and he and a friend of his called Jewett decided that they did want to learn mathematics and science, and did reasonably well; they decided they would try for Oxford, which was a fantastical idea of course; they told the science master that they were not going to be at school much the next week as they were trying for Oxford; the master said nothing, nor offered any help, and they didn't get in; later there was a competitive examination at the school for miners' sons for scholarships, which he won; so he got to Oxford and got a First in chemistry; I know less about my mother's trajectory, but she also must have followed something of a similar route; as I said her father worked in bookbinding; I was fascinated by his work as he did those old account books with ruled lines; you had long sheets of paper that were pushed through on a gantry with lots of pens across which made all the lines; then you turned it round and made all the lines going in the other direction; then he did the marbling for the endpapers; he had a party trick; you could give him a stack of paper and he would feel one with his fingers, then go through with his thumb and tell you how many there were; whether he could actually do it I don't know as I never thought of testing; my brother did some work trying to follow the family further back and ran out in the eighteenth century; I think there was a family bible which had some names; I think they were small farmers in Yorkshire mostly

5:40:21 My father as you can imagine was a driven man really; very kind, but he was also a bit daunting to me; we would shake hands when we met; he was intellectual, with wide interests, reading and so on; he played the French horn; I think as a second son - I had an elder brother, James, dead now, but my brother I think was very much in his shadow, and he too read chemistry at Oxford and went into ICI; I rather thought that he shouldn't have done that; I as a second son escaped a bit but I always felt that I never quite lived up to my father's expectations, though I did later on; even when I was a lecturer here in Cambridge he would ask when I was going to get a real job; but later on I did things that pleased him; I only knew my mother as child; I think she was a romantic; she did like poetry, she liked gardening, we went to France a few times and she loved France and Switzerland; I wish I knew more; that is how I would characterize her; I think that if she had been born a generation later she would have had a career of some kind; I learnt from my sister just last week that she was a teacher for a time but didn't enjoy it and gave it up, but I'm sure she would have done other things other than just becoming a housewife and looking after us; my family on my father's side were very much involved in education and all valued it; my father's younger sister, Nell, became a primary school teacher; his brother, Ralph, became a university lecturer in either physics or chemistry, so his family certainly went into education

8:14:07 On my first memory, I find it difficult to answer; I do have memories of the first house we lived in, not very strong but I can sort of see it and the garden; I have memories of places rather than events so I can remember quite well the houses we lived in and the school; I went to a nursery school called The Grange School; I remember playing under a big holly tree with toy cars but I don't know how old I was; some of the things I do remember were a few memories of the war; there were gas masks in the house and an Anderson shelter in the garden; my father was in a reserved occupation so was there during the war, but he volunteered for the Royal Observer Corps so he sat on a roof watching the planes that were going over to bomb Liverpool docks; he told me he read 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' while he was waiting; he had a set of cards with the silhouettes of German and English aeroplanes and later we played with them when we were children; I can remember events at the nursery school; the school was in several buildings but one of them was a modern building, rather fine, very small classroom building with big windows facing south, with a climbing frame; when I became an architect and studied architecture here I discovered this building was designed by Leslie Martin, Professor of Architecture when I became a student here; I can remember the building well so maybe it had some kind of influence; it had, of course, very small chairs and furniture, and this climbing frame which I later found was inspired by Le Corbusier's brise-soleil for the League of Nations building, on a kind of six foot scale; I remember I was in a play, 'Alice through the Looking Glass', and played a lizard and Miss Taylor lowered me down a chimney, though I can't remember quite why; we did sewing and we made gollywogs - I should hardly say the word - out of black American cloth; well, there were gollywogs in jars of marmalade in those days

12:56:15 I always enjoyed making things, models, though that I suppose was a bit later; I made model buildings; I was interested in drawing, I loved drawing and still do; I decided I wanted to be an architect quite early on, when I was about ten; I have no idea why, I didn't know what an architect was, or knew any, and there were none in the family; I knew it involved buildings and went to see old churches and made drawings; a bit later I did painting; my father was a kind of Sunday painter and we made paintings together; I usually chose architectural subjects; at my father's works they had quite a lot of buildings they had accumulated, various old houses and so on, and there was a surveyor in charge of them; my father arranged for me to shadow him; I didn't learn much about architecture but did learn a lot about rot which didn't come in very useful later on, but from very early on I knew I wanted to become an architect

14:57:20 I don't know why my parents sent me to the Dragon School in Oxford; I guess they wanted me and my brother to have the best education they could give us; I just imagine that they might have found out about the school while they were in Oxford, but otherwise I don't know; we travelled across country and I was a boarder at the school from the age of eight; now it seems very strange to send your children off the other end of the country for that kind of age, but when you are a child you do what you are told. I was happy there, homesick at the beginning, but it was a school that was friendly and welcomed you and you had quite a lot of freedom to do what you enjoyed doing; I enjoyed the classes, the subjects, we did everything of course, and I had a good time; there was Gerd Sommerhoff teaching science who I discovered later was a considerable scientist in his own right, in fact he was a Fellow for a time at University College, my own college; earlier he was at Trinity and wrote about theoretical biology, that I of course knew nothing of; but he ran this wonderful laboratory with all kinds of scientific demonstrations; he had a Wimshurst machine that had all sorts of circus figures who were electrified; he made wonderful radio controlled vehicles, aeroplanes and so on; that I remember very vividly; there was also the river, and boating; I was thinking just the other day about skating, that the school had skates for everyone, and when Port Meadow froze at Oxford, all classes were cancelled and we all went skating for days on end, fantastic; there was a sunken tennis court in front of School House where they laid down newspapers and sprayed at night in order to make a rink there; I'm not a sportsman of any kind at all but I have loved skating for the rest of my life; I don't do it now in case I fall over and break something, but I really loved skating; I've worked in Holland a bit and have good friend there, and in Holland when it freezes very hard they have this tour of the cities of Holland, eleven cities I think; I asked him to phone me when it was going to happen; he did, but they were starting early the following morning so I couldn't go; there was a master called Copleston who taught geography who was known as "Spiv", I don't know why; he had a motorbike and I remember him skating with his crash helmet on; I also remember him on his bicycle on a very hot day coming across the playing fields, down to the river, down a steep slope and into the river on his bike, intentionally; there was a master called Gordon Braddy who taught English, and there was a small group of us, four boys and one girl, Susan [Rachel] Roaf (there were a few girls in the school), and I can remember going with him in his sports car to Woodstock and had a beautiful day there; he took us out to lunch and had one of the old £5 notes, large and printed on just one side, and paid for us; in the Summer holidays we were asked to keep a diary, and the sheets were lined on one side and plain on the other, so we could write but also draw or stick in pictures on the blank page; I still have those diaries; I won two prizes that I do remember, one for maths, and I still have the book, and I also won a prize for woodwork, so maybe there is architecture there in mathematics and woodwork; I was not keen on sport; I remember a spectacular failure in the cricket team where we were all out for ten; I went on to Winchester and there we were obliged to take part in sports but there was a regime where you could choose; I think we had to do some team sports which I never enjoyed, and there was a very vicious sort of football game, something like the Eton Wall Game, which I had to take part in; you could choose to do exercise on your own if you did the required amount of time; you could run, and I did, as that was over quickly, but I also did sculling and that I enjoyed a lot; you were on your own, and once you had got away from the boat house you could mess about

22:59:19 I won a scholarship to Winchester and all the scholarship boys were together in the medieval buildings, so it was a sort of concentration of swots and weeds; for this football game there was a tournament between the 70 scholars in one team and two teams from the 400 other boys; there was this myth perpetrated that when the college boys, the scholars, won in this competition there would be a great feast, barrels of cider and blackberry and apple, and our team won when I was there (I wasn't in it of course), and to their credit the College provided barrels of cider and bowls of blackberry and apple; I did enjoy Winchester although not all the time; I specialized in sciences, mathematics, a subject that I loved, physics, I didn't like chemistry, maybe something Oedipal going on there; I failed my 'O' level chemistry exams; I did enjoy it; it was very high-minded; we read The Times and boys with gramophones listened to classical music, and we had readings of Shakespeare; although I do remember an occasion when the film of "Rock around the Clock" came out, people were tearing up cinema seats, and the Master of the College came down and wanted to hear "Rock around the Clock" on the gramophone, he listened and went away again; I was a great admirer of Buddy Holly; we didn't form a group, but I have a good friend, another architect, who was a member of the "South London Buddy Holly Appreciation Society"; we listened to Radio Luxembourg secretly; again there was quite a lot of time for yourself in Winchester; I loved the landscape around, the water meadows of Hampshire; we could bicycle - could escape quite a lot; I did painting; there was an old boy who had left a printing press to the school with a lot of type, and a good friend of mine, Alex Reid, and I started a printing society; we printed some prayer books, among other things, which was rather strange; in those days the railway tickets were little pieces of green card, and we discovered that we had the type used for printing railway tickets; they had a serial number that was unique for each one, but there was a little device that you could put on the printing press, and we had one, that clicked on one number every time you worked the press; we printed railway tickets and went to the Isle of Wight - my early career in forgery; I made some good friends there, two are still friends

27:30:06 Winchester was a very religious school; we had services twice a day and three times on Sunday; I don't know what I believed at the time but in my family, we never went to Church, we weren't Baptised, I wasn't Confirmed, which is strange because my father resigned from ICI in his fifties and became a Vicar in the Church of England; it is a bit of a mystery to me; I am an atheist but don't think I was very exercised by questions of religion at school; I remember talk, but I don't know how I became an atheist; it was gradual; my mother was an atheist, she told me when she was dying, but we never had any religious upbringing at all at home; later, through the memoir that my father wrote, I discovered that he had some contact with religious groups in Oxford when he was an undergraduate; I don't know my father's trajectory towards becoming a Vicar; he became a Vicar after my mother died; he married again; my step-mother, Wendy, is a Vicar; she became a Vicar after marrying him, so there was obviously a great change in his life; but I was mystified really and I never saw him as a Vicar, and I find it rather difficult given this character of a rather stern person - a good man, and he obviously made a very strong impact in his Parish in Willaston in the Wirral; at his funeral the church was packed; I can't say that I had any crisis at all; I have read a lot about the history of religion, I admire some religious groups, and was very involved in the campaign against nuclear weapons, CND, and came into contact with Quakers in the course of that, and saw what they do, but otherwise not really interested; on politics, I am quite political now, but I wasn't at school or even at university here; I didn't belong to any political society here in Cambridge; I was preoccupied with the arts, architecture, and marginally involved in theatre; I was involved in good causes; I remember working for Shelter, and have become more political with time - maybe because the political situation has deteriorated; I am a member of the Labour Party; my wife, Ruth, was very active in left-wing politics here, then later on, but for me it was more gradual; I can only guess what my parents thought; my father took the Times, my mother used to read the Guardian, the Manchester Guardian as was; I never talked to them about politics really until much later in my father's life; I imagine, though I really don't know, that he was really quite conservative as a businessman; I know that he was very dismayed by what then happened at ICI with it's financialization; he was interested in making chemicals but he saw the way that ICI was broken up, but that is only one aspect of politics; I think he moved left with being a Vicar; he was certainly involved with many practical schemes in the Parish, but I never really talked to him so don't know how he voted

34:33:12 On music I can't say I have any expertise, but my wife plays the piano quite well and my father played the French horn; we had music at home, my father loved music, so we had classical music and music from shows; I liked pop music from it's beginnings; I was very keen on the Beatles, in fact I saw them on stage here in Cambridge on their first tour; they were second on the bill, first was Chris Montez, a name that has now passed from history; it was in one of the cinemas, and in fact I went to a dance where the Rolling Stones played; I was very keen on pop music and used to go to shows in London; I now have an eclectic, slightly superficial series of taste in music; I love music; I like piano music, nineteenth and early twentieth century, French, Poulenc and Chabrier, I like Chopin; I don't like grand opera; I like Purcell and Monteverdi; I like music with melody, clear music, I am not so keen on romantic music; I like formality in music; I can't work with music in the background or the sound of voices when I'm reading or writing; the only time I have music when I work is when I am doing drawing; it is not a large part of my life but I very much enjoy drawing; the kind of drawing I do now is architectural illustrations for papers and books which I love; I do it by hand, I don't do computer drawing, and I listen to music then; drawing is an opportunity for thinking; some people ask why I do all this hand drawing; actually it isn't a waste of time but an opportunity to think about what one's drawing but also about other matters; I like the skill of drawing; I'm nothing outstanding, but am quite skilled at architectural drawing and I really enjoy that pleasure in mastery, in knowing that you can do certain things

38:25:12 I wanted to be an architect and in my father's vision of things it had to be either Oxford or Cambridge, and Oxford didn't do architecture; I think that was probably the reasoning, but I was sent to Cambridge, took the examinations and got in; I have still got the letter which Leslie Martin, who was Professor and Head of Department, wrote to my father saying that Philip had got a place; since then Oxford has a very good architecture school at Oxford Brookes, but that was then; I came to Trinity Hall though I don't know how that choice was made because it is a Law college, but I enjoyed it and made friends there; however, my trajectory was continuously downwards I'm ashamed to say; I did well in the first year when I worked very hard and it was all exciting; it was rather abstract, more of a kind of art school kind of exercises; a bit later we were starting to do buildings; we worked in a studio alongside other people and I enjoyed that, and you learnt a lot from other students; but I think I then became interested in other things and diverted by all the delights that Cambridge has; I became interested in magazines and graphic design and did a lot of work on that; I did progressively worse until after three years I got a 2:2; it was a five-year course and there was the fourth and fifth year diploma, and that I had to resit; so it was not auspicious; how I became an academic is a mystery, but somehow I was admitted to do a PhD; I think it was because I was very academic but in the end I didn't really get to grips with the designing of buildings in detail, and I didn't become a practising architect but a theorist and historian; I have been in practice briefly in vacations, short periods, but I gradually realized that I was not destined for an architect's office; I met my wife at Cambridge which was very much a highlight, and I met her through a society; I was active in the Society of Arts which had weekly talks from painters and designers, philosophers and all kinds of people; we had a dinner at Millers and went on to have a talk; I was very much involved in that and met some very interesting people; I became more and more interested in the arts; I wasn't particularly active myself, but with friends became interested in two fields of art, one was concrete poetry, poetry that is halfway between graphic art and poetry, and kinetic art; we had an exhibition that three or four of us organised in St Catharine's College, very grandly titled 'International Exhibition of Kinetic and Concrete Poetry'; then a bit later, with two others, I started a magazine called 'Form' which was more or less quarterly, and I published it, designed it, and the three of us edited it; it was devoted to form and structure in the arts, rather grandly, and to these two fields of kinetic and concrete poetry, and it looked back to precursors in geometric abstraction, the sort of fields of the 1930s and 20s; that started small and built up and we published ten numbers of that; so I kind of veered away into a kind of history of art, design, and I nearly became a graphic designer, but very glad I didn't; I did student magazines, and was asked Mark Boxer, who was a journalist on the Sunday Times colour magazine, to go and work on that which I did in one vacation, and enjoyed it; he said at the end would I carry on, but I said I should go back and finish architecture; I am glad I didn't but it was fun at the time; being at all-male boarding schools I didn't know much about women before I arrived in Cambridge; my experience with girl-friends was up and down, but I did meet my wife-to-be quite early on, and then she went on to have an affair with somebody else, but we are just about to have our Golden Wedding so we managed to last a long time

46:19:21 When I came here as a student I thought this is what universities are like and this is what schools of architecture are like; I didn't realize that I had hit a very extraordinary period in the School of Architecture here in Cambridge through the person of Leslie Martin who had been the Architect of the London County Council, and was at a point in 1956, and I think Noel Annan, the Provost of King's, was instrumental in getting Leslie Martin appointed; the School before him was quite provincial, the teachers were local practitioners of architecture, some of whom were teaching when I was there, but Martin brought in a number of lecturers, amongst whom were C.A. St John Wilson, Sandy Wilson who was the architect of the British Library and worked as a partner of Leslie Martin; there was a man called Colin Rowe who became the Dean of Architecture at Cornell who's well-known as a writer on architecture, a critic and historian, and Peter Eisenman, a young American architect who has become very famous; they were all teaching in studios so we really had an amazing set of people teaching studio, and history and theory; I particularly enjoyed Sandy Wilson's lectures because a lot of the European Modernism was not all that well-known about, and he lectured on those; he was married to Muriel Wilson who worked for the Arts Council, and Sandy Wilson became a great connoisseur and collector of Pop Art; he had an amazing collection in his house; I worked for him for a short time; the School of Architecture was quite hermetic, and we didn't make as much contact with other departments, even Engineering, as one should have done; the one thing we did do - it was the beginning of computers, and the very beginning of computers in architecture - computer-aided design, which I became very interested in; when I arrived there was just one University computer, the EDSAC machine; there was a man called Ivan Sutherland who was at MIT who wrote a thesis called 'Sketchpad', and he really invented computer-aided design in engineering; people say that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato; all computer-aided design is footnotes to Sutherland; he came here to the Mathematical Laboratory in 1963, and some of us architectural students went and thought that this was going to change architecture, which it did of course, at least the practice of architecture, the tools of architecture, and transformed them; we became interested and that is part of how I got into research; I carried on continuously after my course in architecture, being taken on my Leslie Martin to work on research projects, then to join a research centre called the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies; I did do a Ph.D but never got it; the story is a tragedy really; I decided to write a thesis on biological analogy with architecture - D'Arcy Thompson's work on form figured very much, and was a hero, a great man, classicist, mathematician and biologist; in fact one of my examiners was Lancelot Law Whyte who did an exhibition of the work of D'Arcy Thompson at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1951; anyway, I set out on this very ambitious subject and there was no book before, no thesis really, there were articles and so on, which was strange because there is a long history from the beginnings of biology in the eighteenth century of analogies with the architecture, because of all the sciences it is the subject that deals with design; but it's fragmented, and architects being sort of jackdaw people made different kinds of analogies with engineering structures, skeletons, and the relation of a building to it's environment being an ecological relationship of organisms and so on; so I worked at this and wrote a thesis and submitted it, and I forget the order, but I had three examiners who died in the course of examination; Lancelot Law Whyte, who was an old man, a philosopher of biology - the trouble is that the thesis spread it's net too widely and I wasn't really supervised properly, or at all; Martin was my supervisor but I never met him once for a supervision, it's extraordinary; it was so unusual for people to be doing PhDs then and I don't know how I was allowed to start; I had four committees, four panels, and I had three vivas, during the course of which, over several years, I rewrote the thesis and had it published as a book by Cambridge University Press; at that point I thought what am I doing having a long previous version; I did after a time get an Sc.D. on published work, including that book; it was a real disappointment at the time but I withdrew, so don't have a Ph.D, but I did go into research and worked on some applied projects that Leslie Martin had; it was the era of the great expansion of British universities, and he had quite a lot of work on university buildings; we did more than one project on programming in the architectural sense on university planning, but I was simultaneously working on mathematical topics with a friend of mine

55:20:00 The projects with Leslie Martin lasted about ten years and that was a fantastic time; again I have come to realize that there are times in university life when groups come together, a moment when things are happening that isn't the general run of academic life; that was true in this group that Leslie Martin and my friend, Lionel March, started, the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies, just over fifty years ago; that was very exciting because it was the beginnings of an architectural research that hadn't really existed; Leslie Martin was keen that architecture should be brought into universities, which it was to some extent but generally not, and that it be supported by research, and nobody quite knew what that was; it was also the moment when there were the beginnings of computing, it was also the kind of ferment of ideas about quantification, mathematical models in social sciences, in geography and archaeology and so on; that was the kind of intellectual impetus inside the group, but it was also a moment in the sixties when post-war reconstruction and it's sequels; there was a lot of building going on, there were research groups in government departments, and we were mostly funded by government departments, and so on; that really set me on what I have been doing ever since; sometimes I think to myself that I said this forty years ago and I'm still saying it, but that's OK; I became great friends with Lionel March who was a architect, who'd been a mathematician, we wrote a book together called 'The Geometry of Environment' which was a book that brought together architecture and discrete mathematics of symmetry, set theory, graph theory and so on; it was meant to be to introduce mathematics of that kind into architecture, but also we hoped to introduce some mathematicians into architectural ideas; it was ambitious; we didn't talk about computers much but what was needed at that point in order to build mathematical models of buildings and architectural phenomenon was a way of representing spacial arrangement and geometry for the computer, so our book focussed on those kinds of issues that then became important for what later became computer-aided design; I should make it clear that I am not a computer scientist and have only written a few little programs, but I was very much involved in an organizational way; what happened was that in the research we did work for government departments and in some cases built computer models; they wanted more work and we did work that was not of great research interest but we felt it was important to do that; so we set up a company which was called Applied Research of Cambridge in 1969, and twenty of us from the department put in £100 each, and we had one half-time employee and went from there; that did consulting work but it also started to build computer-aided design systems for architects and engineers and planners; it was an early company, I think probably the first in the world as an architectural CAD; there were other computer-aided design firms, big consulting firms who specialized in acoustics and that sort of thing who were doing computer applications, but ours was certainly very early in the field; it grew fast and doubled in size every year; it came to an end in 1984; we build big tailor-made systems for large clients - they were very expensive, mainly for the building of hospitals, so they were systems where you could charge £100,000 as they ran on big computers; that world changed in the 1980s with desk-top computing, and the whole business changed; we saw it coming, but were bought-out by Mcdonnell Douglas, the aircraft company; my involvement in that was as a consultant, I worked in the Middle East which was a bit farcical, but my work was mainly to run the company; I worked in Iran at part of the Pahlavi University at Shiraz in the South; it was a technical university - agriculture, engineering, medicine - and they were building a new campus; they sought advice on the curriculum and organization as well as buildings; it was very interesting, and we produced designs, but events overtook us; the Shah fell and I don't know what happened but doubt if our plans were implemented

1:02:19:03 I moved from Cambridge to the Open University where I spent a long time; I went there because Lionel March had moved there to a department of design, and it was very unusually not qualified by type of design so it was quite broad; he was then able to make quite a few appointments and he assembled a multi-disciplinary group looking at issues of spacial arrangement and configuration which was what I was fascinated by, and he brought in other people and it was called the Centre for Configurational Studies of which I was the Director; I had the luxury of getting two jobs; one was a lectureship in the Open University, and the other was Assistant Director of Research here in Cambridge, and I took the Open University job and people here said what on earth are you doing; actually it was much more interesting to go to that group; I stayed too long, but I was and am a great believer in the Open University and in what it does; one of the great things about it is that it allows you to teach broadly across subject, which appealed to me; I taught on the History of Art as well as technology and other subjects, but I went there because of the research group that was being set up

1:04:05:00 On my work on Vermeer, I have always been interested in drawing and geometry, and it came out of an interest in perspective; I taught a Summer School class at the Open University on perspective and drawing, a practical class, and one of the things I decided to do was to work perspective backwards, to go from a picture to the three-dimensional scene depicted; I chose Dutch interiors of the seventeenth century for the strange reason that they have tiled floors and that is the key; you can reconstruct perspective pictures in other ways but with a tiled floor it gives you a kind of scale which allows you to determine the size of objects at different distances, and scenes; I started to look at Vermeer's work which I knew slightly, but not particularly well, and saw, as one does if you look at the interiors, that quite a lot of them seem to be the same room, and I thought is it the same room in a geometrical sense; so I reconstructed I think a dozen pictures and showed, with some discrepancies, that they are the same room; so that it how it started; it was nothing to do with the subject of the book particularly which is Vermeer's use of the camera obscura, it was an exercise in perspective that came out of my interest in drawing and geometry; then I started to read the literature of Vermeer and discovered that really for a hundred years people had been talking about Vermeer and optics; soon after the resuscitation of Vermeer's reputation in the 1860s by Théophile Thoré , people started to say they looked like photographs, the Goncourt brothers and Pennell said that Vermeer was the only artist who had made a Daguerrotype of the red-brick houses of his country; they quite soon people started to say did he use optical aids, and various people did experiments and published results, and the main evidence for Vermeer using a camera was that he seemed to reproduce artefacts of lenses which you wouldn't see with the naked eye; in particular, if you have highlights on reflective surfaces they reflect the sources of the light, and if, as we are, it is an interior the highlight would be rectangular because it's reflecting a window; he shows them as circles because they are slightly unfocused lenses which spread point of light because of the circularity of the lens; so that the idea that Vermeer used camera was quite general but I tackled the subject from another direction which was the geometry of this room; you can find the theoretical view points of all the pictures in this room, not all in the same place but in the same area, and for each view point what is described in each picture is what is contained within a pyramid on it's side with the point at the view point of the picture; so I reconstructed these; in one picture in the Queen's Collection, 'The Music Lesson', on the far wall you see a plain mirror which reflects what's behind you and reflects the back wall of the room; if you take these pyramids of view, carry the lines through the view point onto the back wall you get a rectangle, and in about half a dozen cases, perhaps more, that is the same size as Vermeer's canvas; my interpretation was that he has a lens that he is projecting onto the back wall and that's the reason for the coincidence of the size of the projector's image with the canvas; so that was how it happened; I didn't know what I was doing when I discovered that; I remember doing the drawing, I knew unconsciously obviously what it meant, but I didn't immediately realize it's implications, but I remember it very vividly; I never remember dates, but it was at home in Buckinghamshire, and I remember going to show people who didn't appreciate quite what I was talking about; then I wrote it up as a book; I thought it quite specialized and a technical thing, and I didn't realize how controversial it would be or how generally people might be interested in it, but it turned out to be both which was fantastic; one of the best things about publishing the book was that it generated a very large correspondence from all over the world, all sorts of people, not particularly art historians, the didn't like it, but artists, photographers, film makers, wrote long messages; it has featured in quite a number of films because it interested film makers particularly; so I got involved in all kinds of adventures and got to meet all kinds of people; it changed my life in two ways - it led on to all kinds of occasions, meeting people and collaborating with people, but it also changed my confidence, I think, that I felt I could do things; I was a complete outsider as far as the history of art was concerned, but then I thought that I could perhaps do more of these kinds of things; what I hadn't anticipated was that Vermeer specialists would find it so painful and so bitter, that it was diminishing Vermeer's genius, it was crass, it was an intrusion; but Vermeer's perspective was extremely accurate, internally highly consistent; there are two ways you can do that, one is that you can copy optical images, the other is that you can construct them geometrically, which is a kind of machine, it is an algorithm, why is that not cheating; one of the interesting reactions was from painters who said it is a technology, artists are always interested in technical means if they do what they want, if they do something interesting and new which was what I think Vermeer saw; he saw a way of recording effects of light in ways that hadn't been achieved before; why not, that's my view; of course in the seventeenth century it would have been an achievement of the imagination; I think that the idea that it's cheating is a kind of twentieth century notion associated with photography; there is very little known about his life; he is mentioned in a few people's memoirs - Constantijn Huygens went to see him which was recorded by another man present, Balthasar de Monconys, a French expert in optics and a diplomat, both of them very intimately involved in optical science of the time, but they don't say that he had a box; there were contemporaries who were interested in the camera obscura; Caravaggio is a different case, he is a bit earlier; the camera obscura emerges in the late sixteenth century, that is to say that people put lenses into cameras which is the key to getting a bright image, previously you just had a pin hole and it is very faint; David Hockney who I have got to know through the book because he wrote a book about art and optics that came out more or less at the same time; he argues that Caravaggio used optics but that he used a concave mirror with which one can cast images, and he and other people have experimented and there is a very strange underpainting in Caravaggio's which suggest - his portraits, figure paintings, there are marks where various key points on the figure are; they are not outlines, but they seem to be positioning marks, so why would you put that on the canvas; if you wanted to film somebody, or paint them, and get them back into the same position you would make marks on the chair or the floor, by why on the canvas? Well it's because you want to get an optical image registered again in the right place; so that's very suggestive; with Caravaggio there is contemporary evidence that he had lenses, that he worked for Cardinal Del Monte, he had mirrors, he had holes in the ceilings of his lodgings to get sun in, there are various details; David Hockney's book 'Secret Knowledge' is a frustrating book because if the general thesis of the book is that artists used optics more frequently than is generally recognised in conventional history of art, I think that is true; then he treats individual artists and makes large claims that I think are not really supported in detail; I am absolutely convinced about Vermeer but in other case I think David Hockney latches onto fragments of information; I some, I think he has a case, in others I am dubious; the idea that somehow the Renaissance is explained by the use of concave mirrors, I think not; it is a real problem; Martin Kemp who is a supporter of David Hockney's, Professor of Art at Oxford and great expert in optics, makes the case that David Hockney by taking this long view, a synoptic kind of overview of Western painting, raises an issue that has not been sufficiently discussed; the traditional explanations tend to be along the lines of the introduction of oil paints in Northern paintings, the Van Eyck's and so on, the humanistic focus of the Renaissance, the interest in individual portraiture which wasn't there before, those kinds of explanations, and there is of course the rise of interest in optics, Leonardo and others and the invention of perspective technique and so on, and the notion that the mirror is something that can produce pictures - I think the mirror plays a very interesting part, perhaps not enough discussed; I think some of the arguments that were made by Hockney and the people in optics who had helped him are dubious; one of the things one has to say is how much can be done by skill, and what David would call, "eyeballing", looking; some painters are extraordinarily skilled; he and I went with a group to see the Van Eyck altarpiece again; it is just unbelievable, and this is supposedly before the introduction of formal perspective methods; Van Eyck paints church interiors and you think they are not exact perspectives but his painting in a way that he understands all kinds of geometry; so how far can you get without formal techniques; that's a empirical question, isn't it; if I have another project to do it will be something about perspective and picture making, about the interaction of the techniques of perspective with how pictures are made, how technique influences what is painted or what is drawn, and that I am going to try and test myself with; there is a man called James Elkins whose work I admire, who is at the Chicago Institute of Art, and he made a claim that one of the exercises that is often used in perspective books is drawing a lute, a complex curved object; he said that he could draw a lute from memory and he probably can, but the question is how good can he get; some people can jolly well do that

1:22:21:02 On other things I might liked to have done, I would have liked to have gone into films, though I don't think I would have been very good, but I am fascinated by the process, the artifice of film, maybe animated film, I don't know; I have seen film from the margins and taken part in bits of film and I've always found that very intriguing; otherwise I would liked to have been a biologist but it would have to have been a nineteenth century biologist; biology is now industrialized with huge teams and minute subjects; reading about the history of biology which I did for my thesis, I became very interested in the history and theory of biology and evolutionary theory, but whether I could have made any headway, I don't know; on my family, I have one daughter, Lily, who is a museum curator in Leamington Spa; a local museum, and there are two of them, the other one does paintings and Lily does everything else; she is married to Tom Crowther, a philosopher at Warwick University whose work I don't entirely understand; they have two children, Isaac and Beatrice, who are lovely