Invention: A Life

We ran up huge debt that rose to the astronomic level of £10,000 (roughly $13,000), the equivalent of £50,000 ($70,000) today. It was only paid off when I was forty-eight, by which time it had reached £650,000 ($900,000). I like to think that prodigious borrowing is putting money to good use.

We read, played charades, and made things. Lead soldiers, model gliders, and diesel-powered airplanes were my thing. I didn’t play with the soldiers or collect them. What I enjoyed was making them, using my father’s equipment to melt lead in a crucible and to pour the dangerous molten lead into molds.

Dad died the following year, in 1956, when he was only forty. He had been thirty when he came back from Burma. Three years later he was diagnosed with cancer.

Tony taught us that structure was architecture. Most enduringly good modern buildings of the past fifty years, like the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Lloyd’s building in London, as well as medieval cathedrals and ancient designs like the Pantheon in Rome, are defined by the structure that holds them up rather than by cladding or style.

Manufacturing creates real products every day. That is creative and it is industry.

Running also taught me to overcome the pain barrier: when everyone else feels exhausted, that is the opportunity to accelerate, whatever the pain, and win the race. Stamina and determination, with creativity, are needed to overcome seemingly impossible difficulties. That schools are

selling and manufacturing are very much two sides of the same coin.

Jeremy Fry taught me, without saying a word, that each day is a form of education. My own education, in fact, owed as much to mentors like Jeremy and the open-mindedness of Hugh Casson at the RCA as it did to serendipity. When

Bernard was a fundamentally serious person. During my first face-to-face tutorial with him he said, “When you design something, everything about it has to have a purpose. There has to be a reason.” I looked around at the best designs of the time like Issigonis’s Mini, the new architecture of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, and at the radical desi