The Scotsman

John Richards was a composed and masterful architect. A key figure in the (then) practice of Robert Matthew, Johnson- Marshall and Partners he is remembered by his contribution to modern Scottish architecture. The distillation of form and detail to an elegant minimum is the essence of his work. Looking back today at his buildings, the level of abstraction is extremely powerful. One of Sir Robert's rising stars, he was my mentor in the early 1960s and taught me the two fundamental determinants of architecture - the clarity of the diagram and the manipulation of the section. The quintessential John Richards building is Edinburgh's Royal Commonwealth Pool, absorbing its functionally-derived bulk so cleverly into the landscape, lucidly ordering the circulation through the plan, and ingeniously controlling the two classic problems of glare and condensation by the intelligent layering of the section