Following the recent Grade II listing of the headquarters of Gwynedd County Council (see below), I went to have a close look at them. It is scarcely believable that they were designed and built between 1982 and 1984. Pevsner in 2009 was pretty dismissive, describing them as relying ‘on pastiche instead of eloquent restraint’. This feels unfair. Given the extreme sensitivity of the site, in a street right next door to one of the greatest of Edward I’s castles, it looks to me to be an intelligent and thoughtful way of inserting large modern office buildings into a complex grid of essentially medieval streets. It was done by the county architects, but under the aegis and in conjunction with Professor Dewi-Prys Thomas, who ran the Welsh School of Architecture and was deeply interested in traditional Welsh architecture:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 