ADAM Architecture will honour former director Nigel Anderson’s 37-year career with a retrospective exhibition, ‘The Versatility of Tradition’, held at The Pavilion, Winchester Cathedral (27–29 June 2025). The show highlights Anderson’s inspiring work in classical and traditional architecture.
Conceived by the directors at ADAM Architecture, Hugh Petter, George Saumarez Smith, Robbie Kerr, Darren Price, and Robert Cox, the exhibition pays homage to Anderson’s career and recognises his critical role in the success of the practice. Jeremy Musson, architectural historian, writer, consultant, and lecturer, acts as the consultant curator of the exhibition. He has authored an enlightening and contextualising introductory essay for the exhibition catalogue, in which he recalls Anderson’s “great benevolent cheerfulness” on site visits, his “clear-eyed [diplomacy],” and “his vision of architecture [that] is at once humane and full-hearted.”
As an award-winning architect, design director at ADAM Architecture, and treasurer of the Traditional Architecture Group of the RIBA, Anderson has been a consistent and influential figure in architecture. While his stylistic influences are distinctly classical and traditional, from Palladian to Arts and Crafts, before starting his formal training, Anderson began work experience in the unlikely setting of the office of modernist architect Richard Seifert, even working on models of the Nat West Tower. In a reaction against the modernist orthodoxies of the 1970s and 1980s, he belonged to a wave of young architect students who recognised the opportunities of modern technological advances but also had a profound respect for the past and the sheer versatility that tradition could offer.
Anderson became a director of ADAM Architecture in 1991, helping shape the firm into a global leader in classical and traditional design, and leading projects as various as new country houses and restoration projects to housing developments, notably as an early contributor to the English modern vernacular at Poundbury in Dorset, the initiative of King Charles III when he was Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall. ‘The Versatility of Tradition’ presents Anderson’s vision of architecture through images, drawings, and models, re-visiting many of his most high-profile projects and collaborations. Several projects included in the exhibition feature his interpretation of the Arts and Crafts movement’s butterfly plan, which has fascinated him since he was a student.
The exhibition is structured thematically according to five cornerstones of Anderson’s career:
- Butterfly Plan Projects
- New Country Houses
- Restoration & Renovation
- Residential & Urban Design
- London Projects
The exhibition is a timely celebration of Anderson’s career and most significant projects. Anderson has made important contributions, not only in his own work but also as a director of ADAM Architecture. His projects demonstrate a profound respect for a vocabulary of the past and a belief that decent architecture can help make a decent world.
Hugh Petter, a director at ADAM Architecture, comments: “Nigel has never really sought the recognition that he so richly deserves. I am really delighted to have this exhibition to celebrate not only his professional design work, but also to celebrate the man who has been a leader, mentor, friend, and colleague to so many of us for so long.”
Nigel Anderson says: “I am enormously grateful for this opportunity to wander back down a very long memory lane and re-visit so many projects, recalling all the people who contributed to each of them in so many different ways.”
‘The Versatility of Tradition’ will be shown at The Pavilion, Winchester Cathedral, Winchester, from 27 – 29 June. The exhibition will be open daily between 9:30 and 17:00, with last entry at 16:15.
