This project was originally entitled 'Foster to Rogers', a reference to the names of two great British architects and also the name of the original owner of a Victorian flourmill situated in the centre of Cambridge, England.



Built in 1895 for the Foster family, the mill changed ownership 3 times before being closed by Rank Hovis in 2000. For the next ten years it remained unaltered, its swirl of internal piping disconnected but left in situ. On 27 March 2010, the original silo was destroyed in a massive fire, and the mill itself was badly damaged. At the time of writing, the future of the surviving building remains unclear. The rest of the twelve-acre site is being developed as new office space and housing, the main tenant being Microsoft with a new HQ for their research arm. The master planner and chief architect is Lord Rogers.



I had no idea as to what lay behind the walls of this massive battlemented edifice, much of it bleak and windowless. What I found was a tangle of pipes and cables almost impenetrable in places. Still with the strong odour of the ingredients, which were processed here, the atmosphere was one of a giant, sunken vessel, silent except for the constant sound of dripping water and the occasional fluttering of some unseen creature.



The subject matter intrigued me for its resemblance to a giant internal organ with its inexplicable arteries and tubes once connected and fully functioning but now dissected and leading nowhere. I thought of the strange irony of how these extraordinary shapes were soon to disappear forever, to be replaced by the designs of an architect well known for exposing many of the internal elements of his buildings, particularly pipe-work, on the exterior.



However, I changed the name of this book to 'MILL' because I wanted the concept to be as simple as possible: a place that had once been designed to the minutest detail for industrial efficiency is now explored as an abstract, sculptural space.