One of Terry’s many other positive achievements is the employment he has brought to a vast range of builders, craftsmen, carvers, modellers and painters, working in different types of stone and statuary ­marble, as well as brick, wood, plaster, lead, copper, and metalwork in bronze and iron. He has also revived different treatments of brick — rubbed, gauged, stained and tuck-pointed — and is unusual among current ­architects for the trouble he takes with what we might call floorscapes, whether in parquet or marble. His ingenious patterns of lozenges in contrasting colours are inspired by the floors — not usually mentioned in guide books — of Venetian churches designed by Palladio and Longhena.

As a student at the Architectural Association in the late 1950s, Terry was told he would fail if he continued to submit any more classical designs. Things are not much different in schools of architecture today, where the ­establishment still follows the dictates of Adolf Loos, who argued in Ornament and Crime (1908) not only that “lack of ornament is a sign of spiritual strength”, but that it also accounts for the quality of Beethoven’s music, which would never have been written “by a man who was obliged to go about in silk, velvet and lace”. This is surely an absurd view.