Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones gave the Inaugural Robert Maxwell Lecture on Monday, a chance to look back on their long careers, particularly during the period before they worked in partnership when they sometimes collaborated, as when they worked for the Milton Keynes Development Corporation in the early 1970s and on the aborted project for a new Northampton Town Hall, but more often separately, which helped to illuminate the differences in their approach to architecture.

Jeremy was probably more disillusioned by the failures of the Modern Movement in the 1970s following the project that they both worked on at Netherfield at Milton Keynes:-

He then treated housing more traditionally at St. Mark’s Road, a key project of the period:-

And he was deeply interested in the materiality of architecture, as demonstrated by the library he did for Darwin College, Cambridge:-

Edward, on the other hand, after a period teaching in Cornell and at the Royal College of Art, was more interested in issues of urban design and in the 1980s went full-blown monumental. I had never looked at his designs for Grand Buildings on the south-west corner of Trafalgar Square. Imagine if it had been built:-

And, of course, he did Mississauga Town Hall:-