This layering of buildings to provide public space is a Wilford trademark. At the embassy in Berlin, his cutaway facade leads to courtyards - one public, one private - within a tight urban block. At Mannheim, the big yellow rotunda sweeps you into a new courtyard, with a white tower of dance studios, next to the existing old music school. And in Stuttgart, where he has been working steadily for decades now, he is designing new public spaces in what started out as an art gallery extension and ended up as a complete cultural district.
With the Lowry now nearly finished - and whether or not it attracts its full complement of 21st century arts pilgrims - Germany holds most of Wilford's future work, as it does with a surprising number of other British architects. Our feast of big Lottery projects means an inevitable subsequent famine in new cultural buildings. But Wilford is well placed. If Britain gave Stirling and he both their early breaks and a late flowering such as the Lowry, it is Germany, over time, that has proved more consistently faithful.
