Imagine, if you can, an archaeologist working a thousand years from now. A deep-sea diver, she traces the meanderings of an ancient river bed through the lost city of London. Towards its easternmost parts, she comes across a densely and expensively built-up zone. What towers and temples must once have stood there! At its heart, on a prominent peninsular, connected to the river and saturated in aquatic symbolism, is the remains of a small temple-like structure. Here, she concludes, must have been the cult centre for this land of docks.

‘The Temple of Storms’, as its architect nicknamed it, is in fact a pumping station, built on the Isle of Dogs between 1986 and 1988 to deal with the rainwater run-off generated by Docklands redevelopment. But it is not wrong to see it as an edifice with more metaphysical intent – a ‘temple of some strange water-worshipping sect’, as Gavin Stamp, FSA observed at its opening. The pumping station is essentially a shed, and one built of industrial materials to serve a utilitarian purpose. In John Outram’s hands, however, it was converted into something rather more hieratic, somehow both landscape and shrine. Bands of brick in the walls evoke geological strata, while those in the paving ripple and flow like water. From the street can be seen two huge, polychromic columns supporting a pediment, with their capitals intended to speak of the origin myth for the Corinthian order. The temple front itself is pierced with a huge, over-specified fan, which at one and the same time is meant to ventilate the interior, conjure up the winged sun of ancient Egypt and represent the source of the river: ‘a cleft between two mountains, from which water issues as a high band of blue bricks’ (p 49).

Such myth-making is typical of John Outram’s work. Although trained by modernists, he came to reject much of what might be thought characteristic of the modern movement in architecture, becoming a leading figure in what was known in the 1980s as Post-Modernism. Eschewing bare concrete or plate-glass in favour of ornament, colour and symbolism, it was not always a popular approach, even at the time. ‘I thought Salvador Dali was dead, but, no, he’s obviously designing buildings in Bassetlaw now’, complained one councillor when faced by an Outram design (p 134). As an architect, he built surprisingly little – perhaps a dozen major works – and this beautiful little book necessarily devotes almost as much space to the unbuilt as it does to those structures that were actually erected. Nor has posterity been kind. Of those projects completed, something like a quarter have been demolished or radically altered. Only a few remain to evoke the excitement of John Outram’s practice: the pumping station, the Judge School of Management at Cambridge, Duncan Hall at Rice University, the Oude Staathuis in The Hague, and a handful of others.

Part of a series published by the Twentieth Century Society and intended to reappraise the reputation of modern British architects, this is the first major study of Outram’s practice. Geraint Franklin, an architectural historian with Historic England and co-author of the standard work on Post-Modern Buildings in Britain (Franklin and Harwood Reference Franklin and Elain Harwood2009) is the ideal guide. The result is a revelation. Just like an archaeologist or antiquary, Franklin strips away the layers of meaning in Outram’s work, revealing powerful, mythopoeic impulses. What could seem mere whimsy is shown to be a complex symbolic system designed to express fundamental truths about life and death, nature and civilisation.

To achieve his ends, Outram wove together an eclectic set of sources. Ancient Greece and Rome were fundamental, as was the world of ancient Egypt; but so too were his travels in the Mediterranean and his reading of modern theory – especially Paul Ricoeur. Visually, he was equally catholic: Victorian polychromy, the monumental modernism of Louis Kahn, pop art and even aspects of hi-tech. It can all be discerned in his work. Above all, of course, he was engaged in a series of experiments with Classicism, testing its capacity to engage with the modern world. This was never pastiche; he even evolved a new order intended to integrate electrical and mechanical services within his buildings. In teasing out this theme, Geraint Franklin manages to elucidate Outram’s approach and to situate him against the wider background of his times and within the longer story of Classical revivalism. ‘Each generation remakes classicism in its own image’, he concludes (p xvi). Outram’s age was one in which architects were desperately searching for meaning.