George Fullard would have turned ninety-seven today. I don’t know what he’d be working on now – a monument to Boris Johnson, maybe, constructed from U-shaped sewage pipes. Because I imagine the humour and anger and inventiveness of the younger Fullard still burning bright. I know these qualities well, because for the best part of a year, between May 2015 and the spring of 2016, I lived with Fullard. At least, that was how it felt. Fullard himself wasn’t actually physically present – he’d died of a heart attack on Christmas Day 1973, aged fifty. But, if there was no body in the room, there was plenty of evidence.
I began to think about relations between architects and artists on a visit to Paris. In areas like Montparnasse, there’s a concentration of stylish studio-houses around the Parc Montsouris, many of them designed by architects like Le Corbusier, Perret and Lurçat. Twentieth-century architects are often said to have ignored their clients’ wishes in order to pursue their own ideas. But could that be true in buildings which accommodated particular needs and ways of working? They made me wonder about the importance of the artist-client, and whether the studios built for them actually represented a joint project.