William Mann is an architect. He studied in Cambridge and Harvard before practising in London and Flanders. Since 2001 he has been a director of Witherford Watson Mann Architects, based in East London. The studio’s work focuses on the physical continuity of buildings, and the social evolution of cities and institutions. Their projects of transformation include a house within the ruins of the twelfth-century Astley Castle, for which they won the RIBA Stirling Prize 2013; a new theatre for Nevill Holt Opera within a seventeenth-century stable block; and the transformation of the Courtauld Institute of Art at Somerset House. William has written on the subject of the awkward relation of old and new for a range of publications. His essay ‘The Slip Twixt Cup and Lip’ was published in Casabella last year.