Pipistrelle Pavilion London, UK

For several years during the 1990s Simpson was one of the primary guest tutors at a short-lived but influential architectural school which had been set up by the Prince of Wales. During its heyday the curriculum of the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture uniquely combined an Arts and Crafts-based approach with the rigorous teaching of classicism. In 1995 Simpson was able to bring these two threads together in a single exercise: the annual “design and build” project in which students on the school’s Foundation course would develop a design for a small timber structure and then construct it themselves. Under Simpson’s direction they created an enchanting Doric pavilion on the edge of a pond at the site of a former waterworks at Barn Elms, just south of Hammersmith Bridge. This was built by students in the space of a month. This combination of fantasy and efficiency, with its royal flavour, recalls the construction in just sixty-four days in 1777 of the château of Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, as the result of a celebrated wager between the Comte d'Artois and his sister-in-law, Marie-Antoinette.