The two major projects that gave Stone renown in his home country were the United States Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle et Internationale in Bruxelles (1958), and the American Embassy in New Delhi (1959). It is here that his experiments with punctured blocks were first given a comprehensive public airing. The motif of the quarter-divided circle in his grillwork became Stone’s signature. It appeared in many of his buildings, unchanged, and much later in a large quantity of suburban front walls in Britain – it is a pattern we should all recognise. Some of his facades, such as student accommodation at the University of South Carolina (1965) and his own house in Manhattan (1958) are almost completely clad in this same patterned block. Hunting cites this as one of the reasons for Stone’s critical demise: his attempt to create a recognizable architectural brand came with the dire risk of self-pastiche.

At his best Stone designed with the same spirit as Louis Kahn, taking the principles of modernism and blending with historical reference to create buildings with popular appeal. Where Kahn played with form and materiality, Stone was obsessed with layering and layout. He dubbed his approach “new romanticism”, and believed that the design of buildings should “be in the accumulation of history”. No wonder he was never entirely accepted by the dour modernist critics of that era, and for this reason Hunting is quick to position Stone as a precursor to post-modernism. Venturi is name-checked regularly in her argument, though Stone was not about complexity and contradiction – he embraced many of the principles of modernism, his plans were rational and fully formed. His work was an attempt to make modernism prettier, to bring back the decorative element. If anything Stone’s buildings remind us that post-modernity did not begin with the burning of a chair or a visit to Las Vegas, but an accumulation of dissatisfaction with an aesthetic. Stone partly understood this and used his career to help buck a trend.

The layout is not completely haphazard, it has been designed in response to the foundations of previous pavilions. And the most intriguing part of the plan is not deference to these structures, but the idea that a usable space can be arranged to the chance of historic precedence. Instead, a perfectly ergonomic building might have been honed for people to relax and play with these functional uses fastened sturdily to the concept, and how orthodox and dull it might have been.

de Meuron, Ai Weiwei and Herzog’s modest pavilion claims that we are capable of adapting to any form that is presented to us. It is better this way. It encourages us to explore; to create our own personal mental maps, way stations and games. It is a demonstration that architecture does not always need to precisely fit its function. Great – now let’s do the same thing with a new school building.

The newest Big Yellow has been built on Lewisham Way at the site of the old Pyne Brothers department store. It faces Deptford Library, now used as artist studios and gallery, between Lewisham and Goldsmith’s College. The building presents ten fully glazed bays that provide a shallow horizontal view of an internal corridor where a sequence of padlocked yellow doors silently face out of the building towards the street – like a row of changing cubicles at the public baths. This is an odd visual relationship. Is it for our benefit that the narrow passage parades itself so unabashedly?

We have to imagine what we cannot see. We cannot see a woman running her hands across a pile of exotic vegetables, weighing them up and sighing speculatively. We cannot hear the sound of two sibling rivals arguing over whose pocket-money was best spent at the sweet counter. We cannot see an artist with splattered overalls darting across the road with a hot pattie in brown paper to his mouth; nor the student with fragrant espresso nervously scanning her notes and stroking her phone.

We cannot see, hear, smell, touch or taste much active city-life at all, and any number of yellow doors is no substitute for this.