Casson Conder scrapbook

This scrapbook of press cuttings from the Casson Conder Partnership Papers reveals the public reception to almost 40 years of the partnership's work - from the pointedly positive ("No one can usefully criticise this building who has not the mental energy to emerge from the Renaissance") to the scathingly negative ("Above all one detests the sheer brutality of the scale").

Projects like the 1952 competition-winning Sidgwick Hall site in Cambridge put CCP at the centre of the debate between modernism and traditionalism. Their 1960s ribbed concrete elephant pavilion at London Zoo prompted amusement at the luxury accommodation it afforded the animals: "The landscaped garden cost a fortune. And of course there's a swimming pool".