Last week, Stanton Williams won this year's Stirling prize for their centre for high-level research into plant science in the botanic garden in Cambridge. 'It is built for the long-term, for a very serious research endeavour', they say Photograph: Hufton & Crow/Stanton Williams
Alan Stanton and Paul Williams first worked together on shop design. By way of a brief, Issey Miyake gave them one of his jackets. 'He asked us to feel it, the material, the way it was made. Touch and sense are fundamental. They are the ways in which architecture engages with people,' says Williams
Photograph: Peter Cook/Stanton Williams
Early on, the partners also worked on exhibition installations, and they still do. Their experience of working with interiors shapes all their work, they say Photograph: Hufton & Crow
A wall, they say, is not an end in itself but 'only a way of capturing space'. Their 'calm and neutral' style lets the qualities of space that interests them become more apparent Photograph: Hufton & Crow/Stanton Williams
They were asked to design something vandal-proof for this sports centre on the Hackney Marshes, which was built on a small budget. Good design, Stanton insists, does not require extravagant spending Photograph: Hufton & Crow/View Pictures Ltd
'To call them serious, cautious, thoughtful, painstaking or craftsmanly could be a form of faint praise,' writes the Observer's architecture critic Rowan Moore. 'But there is something deeply impressive – a kind of heroism – in the persistence with which Stanton and Williams pursue their way of designing and building and it shows in their work. Insipid or pedestrian it is not' Photograph: Stanton Williams
