Sussex Heritage Trust’s Person of the Year 2018, Neil Holland, on preserving the county’s beauty as an architect and a landscape painter.
When Neil Holland was named Person of the Year at the 2018 Sussex Heritage Trust Awards he admits he was surprised.
“I’m not doing the perceived visual thing that architects do,” he says from his townhouse in Chichester where he lives surrounded by the watercolors he has painted from a very young age. “I was delighted – it felt like all the thinking I’ve been doing in painting and architecture has been recognized. It wasn’t just for me, but for all the people who have contributed to the success of the practice with their talent, creative skills, commitment, integrity, and friendship over many years and continue to produce architecture of the highest quality across Sussex, Hampshire, Surrey, and Kent.”
Before he retired in 2016, his company Neil Holland Architects had received more than 50 architectural awards in 40 years of work. But from the very start, Neil had swum against the Modernist tide – instead of taking inspiration from architectural history and each building’s place in the landscape.
“I used to argue with my tutors when I was in my 20s as a lot of what they were teaching was brutal concrete,” he says. “It was in the middle of the Vietnam War, we were all a bit nervous that we might get called up – and then there was this architectural style called Brutalism. The world felt brutal enough as it was!”
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