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Rutter Carroll

Rutter Carroll was born and educated in the North East of England studying at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the University of York where he completed his masters degree on the work of Ryder and Yates. This led to his meeting Gordon Ryder in 1984 and marked the beginning of an association that lasted until Gordons death in 2000. He has continued to promote the importance of the contribution made by Ryder and Yates to the history of modern architecture both locally and nationally in a series of lectures and seminars to local and national societies.

Throughout Rutters time as an architect he has continued to promote the importance of the contribution made by Ryder and Yates to the history of modern architecture both locally and nationally in a series of lectures and national societies.

Cyril Winskell, a consultant architect with a particular interest in the conservation of Modern buildings

Movements in art and architecture have always taken time to reach the North of England. The Grand Tour took centuries; John Dobson brought up Greek Revival a decade after Lord Elgin imported the Parthenon marbles; Georgian terraces were being built in the early Victorian period. So it was that, in the late 1940s, when the School of Architecture at Kings College, Newcastle upon Tyne was teaching the worthiness of Lutyens, Asplund and Frank Lloyd Wright (with a nod towards Gropius and Aalto), two young men arrived in Newcastle with tablets of stone (or perhaps stencilled tracing paper) from the atelier of Le Corbusier.Gordon Ryder was to have taught in the School, but instead he practised with Peter Yates and the rest is history: they and their successors carried on the Modern movement at a time when the rest of the country was descending into post-modernism and worse. Ryder and Yates and Powell & Moya show striking similarities: both partnerships had an architect-artist and the practices drew no distinction between the disciplines. They never published their credo, they simply performed it. The approach that informed their designs never wavered.

Review by Professor David Greenwood, School of the Built Environment,Northumbria University, UK

This book offers a retrospective on two important twentieth century architectural designers, Gordon Ryder and Peter Yates, whose work – ranging from domestic commissions through social housing, to larger public and private sector buildings – has had a major impact on the built environment, particularly in their northern heartland. An intelligent and informative offering, it can be read at a number of levels: it is a beautifully illustrated commentary on the work of the Ryder & Yates practice; it is a professional biography of the two, charting their careers, influences and professional beliefs; and it is a valuable resource of architectural (and indeed social) modern history. As an architect and an academic himself, Carroll is clearly impressed by the tenacious and largely uncompromising design philosophies of his subjects, and yet he manages to maintain a measured, unbiased and scholarly ‘distance’ throughout, making this a truly valuable text for students, practitioners and devotees of architecture and architectural history. Taken individually, each project study presents an informative resource for the reader, with the added bonus of a contextualising narrative that reveals their chronological progression. This is an important contribution to the series and moreover, an enjoyable reading experience.