Boys and their toys, eh? Sir Norman Foster and his team spent many happy hours toying with 1:72 scale Airfix kit war planes as they resolved the form and plan of the superb American Air Museum in Britain at Duxford.
The Cambridgeshire museum last year won the Stirling Award for architecture sponsored by the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Sunday Times. This is the only major British prize that carries anything like a decent purse - although £20,000 is presumably chicken-feed to Sir Norman, who, on most accounts, is one of the world's most successful architects.
As Sir Norman's great passion is flying, it should come as no surprise that the American Air Museum devoted to a collection of magnificent warbirds clustered around a fearsome B-52 Strato-fortress nuclear bomber, is one of his finest designs.
"Duxford", read the Stirling Prize citation, "is a great big, clear-span building beautifully integrated into its flat landscape, cunningly daylit around its perimeter, and with a virtuoso roof of precast (concrete) pieces engineered by Chris Wise of Ove Arup, from which the planes are suspended.
"It is an object of beauty, displaying its collection of warplanes well and dispassionately. It is one very simple idea - the great curving hangar - but replete with imagery, from ancient earthworks to the cockpit of a modern jet fighter."
Even the most hardened antiwar campaigner would be hard pressed to disagree.
The museum was designed in 1986, but stayed grounded. A mercy mission by the National Heritage Lottery Fund enabled work on the £7.9 million project to start in 1995. It was completed in 1997. The museum has since become a memorial to those who died taking part in the US Army Air Force's raids over occupied Europe between 1941 and 1945.
MANY were based in East Anglia. "As such", says the citation, "it has something of the hushed calm of a cathedral, its planes crewed by ghosts."
What it also possesses is a window bigger than any cathedral can boast overlooking the Duxford runway, along which US warplanes, old and new, can be seen taking off and landing as a salute to their retired siblings parked in Foster's hushed hangar.
