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Richard Mac Cormac and David Lea

Both very english architects, both products of that generation of students who were taught by the victors of the vicious struggle between traditional and modern architects, which raged between the first and second world wars.

The victors had all themselves been trained by traditionalists, and trained to design traditional buildings, before espousing what struggle transformed into a creed, allegiance to which had to be proven over and over again in every facet of every project. This fight was necessary, and the fight was hard - the old guard fought hard, and fought dirty when they had to.

During this struggle, the eventual victors developed such cold contempt for their erstwhile oppressors, that, once they had won, they decided to act as if they had never existed. They taught their students with a Year Zero approach, which persists to this day.

And yet, these teachers' roots were deep in traditional architecture. Some of their students were sensitive and intelligent enough to grasp this, and while espousing the creed (it was unthinkable to do otherwise - look at the orthodox view of Christopher Alexander), they actually learned to love architecture, and found ways to maintain continuity and coherence in their work, whatever its modernistic character.

This conflict results in architecture which is at once rich and self denying, using allusion and metaphor, but only in the mutest and most buttoned up of ways, finding in materials and combinations of materials, in spatial relationships, methods of incorporating complexity and meaning without resorting to the crude, overt posturing of post-modernism.

In the end, neither produce buildings you can fall in love with, or that truly live, but which are nevertheless deeply respectable, intelligent, sane and humane; conditions which the huge majority of modern western architects fail utterly to meet.