Sir – The obituary appreciation of Rick Mather (April 25) should remind all Oxonians of how fortunate Oxford has been to have had Rick Mather to demonstrate the supple and beautiful ways in which contemporary architecture can fuse and infuse earlier styles: the ARCO and Sloane Robinson Buildings at Keble College, the new library and archive room at The Queen’s College, the theatre/auditoria at Corpus Christi and Worcester respectively and, of course, the wondrous temple of light and shade which is the new Ashmolean, will be used, viewed, and admired for centuries to come, should humanity endure.

Work at Mansfield is, as noted in the obituary, in progress. The Ashmolean’s Crossing Cultures, Crossing Time was perhaps a perfect motto for Rick Mather, a gentle and generous imagination born and raised near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers, in a suburb of Portland, Oregon.

Not far away from Portland is the Tualatin Forest, rich with the play of light and shadow from douglas fir and alder, the forest floor dense with trillium and here the teenage Mather helped his engineer father build a family summer house in a forest clearing.

Arguably it was there, in Oregon, that the seeds were sown for Mather’s rare understanding of how materials and shape complement one another, so much to Oxford’s gain.

A rare person; an immense talent; a great architect.

Bruce Ross-Smith, Headington