Monograph Charts Rick Mather's Quiet Mark on London Culture

Between 1999 and 2000, Rick Mather completed three of London's most significant cultural interventions: the glass courtyards at the Wallace Collection and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and the new quadrangle at Dulwich Picture Gallery. A new monograph argues these works cemented a reputation that has since faded from view.

Kester Rattenbury, an experienced architectural journalist and critic, has written Rick Mather: The Complete Works, published by Lund Humphries at £60. The book chronicles the American architect's life, influences and work, and evokes the spirit and atmosphere of 1980s and 1990s UK architecture culture.

Mather lived from 1937 to 2013 and called London home for many decades. Since his death, his profile has remained, in the source's words, "determinedly more low-key than many of his surviving contemporaries." Rick Mather Architects nonetheless had a subtle but substantial impact on London's cultural scene in the 90s and noughties.

Born in Portland, Mather came to the UK in 1963 and worked first at the firm of Lyons Israel Ellis. One of the more successful exponents of Brutalism, LIE counted an impressive roster of alumni: James Stirling, James Gowan, Alan Colquhoun, John Miller, Neave Brown and Richard MacCormac. All, like Mather, went on to set up era-defining modernist-infused practices.

Mather started his own firm in 1973, after a little-known spell in Southwark's architecture department, back when councils ran such departments in house. He also worked for the Architectural Association in Bedford Square and grew close to the organisation's radical and influential coterie of young architects. Early projects included bookshops, homes, refurbishment works to the AA itself, and unpublished schemes for Heaven nightclub in Charing Cross.

His commitment to modernist aesthetics rarely wavered, yet his projects were never oversized and grandiose. He worked instead on a succession of discretely luxurious private houses. These included his own reworked Georgian townhouse in Camden, with a spectacular roof garden – a lifelong passion – and the multiple award-winning Priory in Hampstead, a grand modern dwelling in the spirit of the area's 1930s modernist villas.

Mather's white-walled asceticism aligned neatly with the minimalism that permeated upscale 80s and 90s London retail and residential design. His love of Le Corbusier's sculptural idiosyncrasies was always in play, as were experiments in structural glass. But it was the careful and bravura fusion of old and new that won his studio its most significant commissions.

The three London gallery projects completed between 1999 and 2000 established a reputation for sympathetic but dynamic updates. Other major works followed: the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, the updated Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and Now and Zen, a cultish Covent Garden restaurant featuring a 'dragon' waterfall made from a cascade of glass bowls – a space that would have been perfectly at home in the Instagram era.

The book is richly illustrated, a fitting tribute to an architect who loved architectural draughtsmanship. For a practice that shaped how London's museums meet their historic fabric, the monograph offers a long-overdue account of an architect whose influence outlasted his fame.