Eric Parry’s spacious office and meeting room is screened from the remainder of his bright Clerkenwell studio by a wall of books. Perusing them, the depth and breadth of his interests quickly becomes apparent; encompassing, amongst other things, history and archaeology, a panoply of artists and an intriguing, eclectic range of architectural references.

This is to be expected, given his background as a distinguished teacher and his status as a Royal Academician. What is perhaps more surprising is that our discussion, which took place beneath a Richard Serra canvas, across a large table filled with models and drawings, did not concern one of his various public commissions. Instead it related to a programme that, for an architect of his persuasion and talents, might appear rather less enticing - the speculative office block.

Such prejudices appear justified when one remembers back to the earliest building for which Eric Parry Architects became known - a pair of studios for the painter Tom Phillips and the sculptor Anthony Gormley. Such a commission might seem to reinforce the notion of an academically inclined architect, embedded within a rarified world of art and high culture, but in fact the practice was simultaneously working on another defining project; an office pavilion within the Stockley Park business park development, near Heathrow.

Strands of work have extended from each of these beginnings. However they should not be understood as simple, parallel trajectories, with lucrative commerce economically underpinning cultural prestige – the usual cross subsidy. Instead they have intertwined and overlapped to achieve a refreshing level of equivalence; together becoming the DNA of a practice that has, with a singular degree of success, confronted the breadth of the heterogeneous urban condition that is London and which understands the need to consider both the figure and the ground of the city, with equal concentration.

Twenty years on, this holistic view is eloquently demonstrated in Parry’s latest commercial offering, a substantial new office and retail building at No. 23 Savile Row, within the exclusive urban surroundings of London’s Mayfair. Here art, craft and commerce are drawn into quietly dramatic dialogue.

The building also marks the conclusion of a more tightly defined period in EPA’s oeuvre; completing a suite of projects, which were born out of a seismic shift in the influence of corporate power and wealth within London, during the last decade. The physical consequences of that political, cultural and economic transformation rippled across the urban fabric from its epicenter in the City of London, where the three earlier projects: Finsbury Square, Leadenhall Street and Aldermanbury Square are to be found. This radical reshaping of the city has shuddered dramatically to a halt in the face of the current economic downturn and the blossoming cranes have quickly withered. Nonetheless, the effect on London’s grain and scale will be lasting and Parry’s contribution can be seen as a rather exceptional high point in what might generally be considered an unfortunate legacy.

The primary reasons for the quality and consistency of his body of work are encapsulated in a remark from Parry himself - that his first commission, the highly regarded Finsbury Square project, arrived not because of a perceived expertise in the programmatic constraints of commercial office development, but rather in recognition of an attitude to the city.

As with its predecessors, the building in Mayfair is innately concerned with and responsive to the particularities of its urban situation. Critically however, this relationship is not a subservient or passive one, nor is it the resultant of a predetermined attitude, indiscriminately applied. Instead each of the buildings seeks to become an active agent in reinforcing or transforming innate, but often latent, qualities found within its context. In this way each delivers an individually appropriate and very definite contribution to the spatial and formal character of the city that surrounds it.

At Savile Row, EPA has confronted the issue of a prominent site and a scale of development that is considerably larger than its immediate neighbours - with a principal street frontage of 50m and a return façade of 42m, facing onto New Burlington Street. The project replaces the existing post war building that occupied the site, Fortress house, latterly the home of English Heritage. This had been built in 1950 and was itself the result of a fortuitous combination of bomb damage and demolition, which had opened up the Northern end of Savile Row to Conduit Street. Whilst it was a building with definite qualities, its didactic plan and limited floor to floor heights made it difficult to re-appropriate and its introverted demeanour, concentrated around an axial entrance court, left it unresponsive to the wider context of the surrounding streets. Its demolition was nonetheless controversial and in replacing it, the architects have been very careful to address and to maximise the latent opportunities of the site.

Parry’s initial moves were akin to those of Alison and Peter Smithson, within the similarly sensitive context of the Economist Plaza in St James – breaking down the site into an ensemble of pieces and creating an element of public space. However, the plan was subsequently ‘hardened up’ and the resultant is a building that at the urban scale, straightforwardly reinforces the line of the pavement and the grid of the street; both predominant characteristics of the historic Burlington Estate, of which Savile Row is part.

In an echo of Fortress House, the new building retains an axial relationship to Savile Row, with two wings of accommodation stepping forward to the street line, separated by a slightly set back, canopied entrance and foyer. This leads through to an atrium, with a densely planned core to the rear of the site. These interiors have been completed by another designer.

Street presence is reinforced by the introduction of a ground floor retail unit in the Northern-most wing, on the prominent corner that opens to Conduit Street. This cleverly utilises a rise of 600mm along the Savile Row frontage to attain the generous floor to ceilings required for high end shopping. Behind it, along the minor edge of New Burlington Place, are secondary and service access points.

Looking from Conduit Street, the building becomes a significant presence, with the ‘vitrine’ of the new shop introducing the refined world of bespoke tailoring that lies beyond. In its response to the wider surroundings, the building seeks to improve on the rather ponderous relationships that the similarly scaled Fortress House had imposed on its neighbours. Seen obliquely, the two wings accentuate a rhythm, which already echoes along the length of Savile Row. Sectionally, a tri-partite strategy offers empathy with the scale of adjacent properties and the street as a whole, with the base and four storeys above establish an eaves height. Set back from this, two further storeys, originally intended as residential but now converted to office use, form a visually lighter roof top pavilion.

The theoretician Colin Rowe regretfully concluded that ‘face was never a preoccupation for modern architecture.’ In giving his buildings a very definite physiognomy, Parry clearly places the work of his practice apart from, and beyond the reach of the didactic urban machinery of hi-tech. For whilst a fascination with the conditions and facets of modernism is embedded in his work, the buildings’ collectively reject the orthodoxy that the free plan inevitably destroys the primacy of the façade as the representative moment of a building. Thus they bring the pre modern, the modern and the post modern into a satisfying continuity. Within these buildings, the ubiquitous multiplier of the 1.5m grid is respected, but it is not allowed to dissolve the exterior into the numbing repetition of a curtain wall. Nor is the problem of the face ignored through the application of veils or screens - leading to a kind of de-scaled objectification. Instead, such pragmatic concerns become merely another system of order within a complex matrix of thinking that resides in issues of proportion, scale and tectonic; of solid and void; of window and wall.

Previous expressions have demonstrated this through a layering of components that are allowed to slip past each other, interlacing tectonic clarity with experiential shifts in scale and depth, light and shadow. This is most immediately evident at Finsbury Square where the extraordinary screen of load bearing, self supporting masonry plays against tauter rhythms of bright stainless steel framing behind, with light bouncing in the space between the two. Close inspection reveals similar, if more compressed intricacies in the gridded, stainless steel façades of the tower at Aldermanbury Square or in the midnight blue frames of Threadneedle Street - although in the latter case, it is shadow and structure that become almost interchangeable.

The development of the Savile Row façade began in a similar way, as a process of ‘weaving’ stone above a pre-cast base. However, this was quickly put to one side in the face of a sensitive planning conversation. Instead the project developed as a more traditional dialogue of Portland stone string-courses and pilasters, spaced at 3m centres within a 6m structural grid. At street level, a black Indian granite is utilised to form a strong ground, in contrast to the lighter stonework above.

Parry has made a number of eloquent and expressive stone façades, notably at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Prior to this one though, each of them worked with the idea of carving back from a planar surface. Perhaps it was the deep, sensuously curving, Mendelsohn-like projections of Leadenhall Street that emboldened him to express the horizontal strings in this case. Whatever the cause, the result is a strongly classical resolution but one which embodies an implicit modernity, recalling perhaps the Chicago School or the work of ‘Greek’ Thomson in Glasgow.

Such resemblances are in part to do with the democracy of repeating floor to floor heights but are largely a result of the slenderness of each element of the composition. Parry is rigorous but he is not a moralist and he is happy to announce that this lightness is the result of the stone being only partially self supporting - tied back at intervals to the precast concrete panels holding the window assemblies and hence to the steel frame. The frame is extremely stiff, allowing the corners to become particularly delicate, formed around a fragile 200x200 RHS. This move necessitated the single column in the floor plate of each wing, but it more than justifies that small compromise.

A slipping of layers within the façade is still just discernable within the 550mm wall depth. This is artfully registered through the slight shift in the grain of the larger pieces of stone used within the revealed openings and is made literal by the shadows of movement joints at the back of each pilaster. These subtleties express something of the inevitable discontinuity of contemporary construction. At the same time the architect has worked hard to emulate more traditional structures, utilising 3.3m unbroken Portland stone lintels, which span each opening and 3mm joints between each stone.

Collectively these complementary expressions provide a satisfying tectonic clarity. More ambiguously, a free-standing, ribbed aluminum extrusion stands centrally within each window bay. At first glance this would appear to act as a prop to the long stone lintels. In fact its purpose is wholly non structural and entirely visual. Functionally it masks any intermediate partitions that might be erected on the half bay, within the interior. Equally importantly though it provides an accent - heightening the modulation of light and shadow.

Such creative ambiguities and playful tensions seem to exist within each of Parry’s projects, although their precise manifestation remains particular to circumstance. These are what allow the apparently laconic forms and relationships to oscillate within ones consciousness, moving beyond mere well-tempered background. The final element of the composition draws the building as a whole into such a dialogue.

In direct response to the sense of restraint exhibited throughout, the shallow space above the entrance canopy has become what might be described as a kind of votive niche at an urban scale – a space for a sculpture.

‘Here’ is a work by esteemed American artist Joel Shapiro. Specially commissioned, it was developed in dialogue with the architects and the building. The dynamic composition of five linear, raw bronze pieces is apparently weightless and yet obviously massive; both figurative and abstract. Held suspended from the stone on either side, it creates a dialogue with the façades that feels both free-spirited and absolutely precise, a leading dancer to the building’s corps de ballet.

This does not feel like a percent for art appendage but rather an intrinsic and essential element in the composition. Indeed, the minimalist, Dan Graham like qualities of the reflective glazing that fills the recess behind it would feel a distinctly curious conceit without its presence. With it, that unexpectedly taut surface introduces a necessary space. Seen as a whole, the warm, tonal colour of the bronze heightens the monochromatic qualities of the stone. Close to, the rhythmic marks of the sawmill, captured within the sand-cast surface, respond to and echo the larger urban rhythms of the façade.

It is clear that the loss of a public space at ground level, speculated on within the early schemes, is more than compensated for in this very different form of public event. It is a gift to the city whose arrival, as Parry suggests, might have been the instigator for a three day festival of celebration, in earlier times.

If the Savile Row building concludes his sequence of latterday palazzi, dedicated to the art of commerce and embellished, like their forebears, by the finest artists, then Parry’s final office development, for the moment at least, promises a rather different urban expression; one that might be succinctly characterised as poché. Very close by, within an urban block bounded by New Bond Street, Maddox Street and George Street, this mixed use development of office, shopping and housing, expertly weaves its way through back courts and through both new and existing buildings. If Savile Row is a big man in an impeccably tailored, bespoke suit, then the striking infill piece emerging on New Bond Street is a snake hipped youth, sliding into the space between his neighbours, wearing a hand stitched snake skin jacket…

I won’t spoil the ending. The project is unfinished at the time of writing and deserves its own review. I mention it in returning to the point that I touched on at the outset. For while there may be architects in London who have built more and more noticeably, there are few whose work is more encompassing. From St Martins in the Fields to Savile Row, Parry has succeeded in approaching the complexity of the city and the diversity of its building stock with perception, precision and personality – he is emerging as a quintessential London architect.