Posts Tagged Obituaries
Adrian Cave obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 26, 2012
The architectural career of my friend Adrian Cave, who has died of cancer aged 76, exemplifies the way disability issues have moved to the foreground of our culture. At an age when others consider retiring, Adrian embraced the concept of inclusive design and pioneered the transformation of disabled access to public buildings, so that it became integral to the creative vision rather than an add-on.
Adrian was the UK's first registered access consultant. In the past 10 years, he worked with architects including Norman Foster and Herzog & de Meuron and advised at the formative stages of projects such as Crossrail, the Olympic village, Tate Modern and the revamp of the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. His mantra was "access with elegance". At Christopher Wren's Royal hospital, in Chelsea, west London, he concealed a lift behind 18th-century panelling to aid those with difficulties climbing the staircase, satisfying English Heritage in the process.
Adrian worked as a Samaritan and with Emmaus House on behalf of the homeless. He was made OBE for his dogged work in the transformation of a defunct cinema near his home into Ealing Community Resource Centre.
He was born in Great Bromley, Essex, and attended Ampleforth college, North Yorkshire. He adored adventures, such as navigating the canals with his grandchildren and walking with friends in Italy or Spain. He is survived by his wife, Felicity, whom he married in 1964; his son, Ben, and daughter, Zoe; and five grandchildren.
Isi Metzstein obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 23, 2012
Innovative architect who designed some remarkable postwar British buildings
Isi Metzstein, who has died aged 83, was jointly responsible for some of the most remarkable and distinguished modern architecture in postwar Britain. Under the umbrella of the Glasgow practice of Gillespie Kidd & Coia (GKC), for whom he worked throughout his career, he and his colleague Andrew MacMillan designed a series of striking churches in and around Glasgow, as well as school and university buildings further afield, including Robinson College, Cambridge. They were also the architects of St Peter's Seminary at Cardross, Argyll and Bute, once widely regarded as the finest modern building in Scotland but now a derelict ruin.
Metzstein was born in Berlin, the son of two Polish Jews, Efraim (who died in 1933) and Rachel. He escaped Germany in 1939 under the Kindertransport scheme. The boy, his siblings and their mother were scattered all over Britain until the family was eventually reunited. The young Isi had been taken in initially by a family in Hardgate, Clydebank, and he remained in Glasgow for the rest of his life.
In 1945, having left school, he decided he wanted to become an architect, and a chance connection led to an apprenticeship with Jack Coia, the sole surviving partner of Gillespie Kidd & Coia, the firm he had taken on in the late 1920s. At the same time, Metzstein enrolled for evening classes in architecture at the Glasgow School of Art, where he met MacMillan, whom he brought into the firm in 1954. Together, they were to transform the practice and, as "Andy and Isi", became a celebrated double-act, as designers, teachers and talkers.
Coia, the son of Italian immigrants, had reopened the office after the second world war and resumed his association with the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Glasgow, having built a number of churches in the 1930s. The archdiocese was about to embark on a programme of churchbuilding. At first, Coia's archi tecture continued in the manner of his prewar work, but soon the influence of his two and open-minded assistants became evident, familiar as they were with avant-garde buildings in continental Europe, in particular the work of the Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier.
The turning point was the church at Glenrothes, a new town in Fife, which was completed in 1957. With its tapering, open plan, austere aesthetic and white exterior, this was clearly the creation of different hands. Henceforth, Coia's task was to secure the commissions, while the work was carried out by his young and expanding office. Although GKC were responsible for schools and some housing during the late 1950s and 60s, what stood out was the series of bold and inventive churches. It is ironic that, while the Roman Catholic hierarchy believed the architect to be the almost mythical Coia, the designing was in fact carried out by a Jewish refugee from Berlin and a Glaswegian of Highland Presbyterian ancestry.
Metzstein, who described himself as a "lapsed atheist", had a strong sense of the numinous, achieved in his churches by the dramatic handling of light in dark interiors. Some of the churches were in the tradition of tall and powerful brick boxes, such as those at East Kilbride (1962) and Kilsyth (1964). Others – St Benedict's, Drumchapel (1970), Our Lady of Good Counsel, Dennistoun (1965) – had highly inventive plans and unconventional internal spaces.
However, their masterpiece was undoubtedly St Peter's (1966), where neo-Corbusian ranges with a brilliant stepped-section were disposed around an existing Victorian mansion.
The work of GKC stood out from that of their equally modern-minded contemporaries in England. As Metzstein explained: "We got the unique opportunity to design modern buildings that were not modern programmes – churches, convents, seminaries … We were relatively young and more excitable, maybe … We were designing churches, which are one-off buildings with an emotional and religious context."
By good fortune, the firm never jumped aboard the high-rise, system-building juggernaut. Metzstein and MacMillan were also unusual in having a serious interest in history, appreciating the character of Glasgow's urban fabric of stone tenements and extolling the merits of the work of the city's great architects of the past, Alexander "Greek" Thomson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, at a time when it was either ignored or under threat.
In 1969, when Coia was awarded the Royal gold medal for architecture, he asked that his two partners be associated with the honour. But by then things were beginning to go wrong. The patronage of the archdiocese was coming to an end (although new jobs appeared in England) and problems were emerging with the firm's experimental buildings. As with Frank Lloyd Wright, stories abound about leaking roofs and structural problems. The campanile at the East Kilbride church was taken down and in 1991 the wonderfully dramatic church at Drumchapel was summarily demolished a few days before it was due to be listed. As for St Peter's, which was superbly constructed (unlike some of the churches), it was rendered almost obsolete as soon as it was finished by the new policy, after the Second Vatican Council, of training priests in urban settings. It was abandoned by the archdiocese in 1980 and fell prey to vandals. Despite its grade A listing by Historic Scotland and its inclusion on the World Monuments Fund's list of sites most at risk, the structure remains a ruin.
Metzstein later announced the foundation of the Macallan club (named after his favourite whisky), whose members are the architects of buildings "demolished or mutilated without the involvement of its designer" and who, "the victims of brutal, premature 'scrap-heaping', are witnesses to the fragility of permanence which characterises [the] century". This may have been a joke, but it all hurt – deeply.
The firm's last building was Robinson College, an complex and inventive redbrick response to the growing reaction against the Modern movement, which was completed in 1980. Metzstein then devoted himself to teaching and lecturing, at the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art (of which MacMillan was head), at the University of Edinburgh (where he was professor) and elsewhere.
He was held in great affection and respect by architects all over Britain, and was both revered and feared for his incisive and often devastating criticism of student work. It was annoying that recognition – and a growing admiration for the work of GKC – came so late. When Metzstein and MacMillan were presented with an award by the Royal Institute of British Architects for their teaching in 2008, Metzstein noted that "it would have been even better to receive this while we were still alive".
He remained until the end the conscience of a rational modernity, and was "allergic to 'starchitects' whose work fills the magazines". He much disliked the posturing arbitrariness of such buildings as Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, "which I can't take, both as an architect and as a Jew born in Berlin".
Behind Metzstein's acerbic wit, uttered in his guttural accent – a distinctive combination of German and Glaswegian – was a warm and generous personality. For an architect, he was unusually well-informed, intellectually curious and cosmopolitan in outlook.He lived with his wife, Dany, also of central European Jewish origin, and his family, in Hillhead. At home he created an ideal city made of metal tourist souvenir models of buildings which his many friends would send him from all over the world.
He is survived by Dany, his children, Mark, Saul and Ruth, and his brother and twin sister.
• Israel Metzstein, architect, born 7 July 1928; died 10 January 2012
John Madin obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 19, 2012
Architect who helped transform postwar Birmingham
No single architect changed the face of Birmingham as radically as John Madin between 1950 and 1975. His buildings, however, are subtly different from the concrete hulks surrounding New Street station and lining the inner ringroad, created by the city engineer, Herbert Manzoni, which gave Birmingham its 1960s consumerist image. Madin, who has died aged 87, was the architect to the Calthorpe estate, west of the city centre, which he transformed with sensitive new housing and an office strip, before he progressed to build many of the city's most individual offices and public buildings.
Madin was born in Moseley, Birmingham, the only child of a master builder and cabinetmaker who fostered his interest in architecture from an early age. He began his career in Manzoni's office aged 16, before entering the Birmingham School of Architecture, a training interrupted by second world war service with the Royal Engineers. As with many of his contemporaries, the war encouraged Madin to think big, and to see the answer to the depressed and damaged city he found on his return in 1947 in the Modern movement.
He set up in independent practice in 1950, designing housing and shops for the council and private developers, before in 1954 he was commissioned to design offices for the Engineering and Allied Employers' Federation. This small block in Edgbaston, realised in the decorative Scandinavian style that he had admired when, as a student, he had hitchhiked round Sweden, led to commissions from the Chamber of Commerce in 1960-61 and the Birmingham Post and Mail, whose offices (opened in 1966) included a 17-storey glazed office tower set over a low podium, in the style of Lever House, New York. Madin's buildings grew to match the ambitions of the 1960s, with glass giving way to heavier concrete finishes later in the decade.
The Engineering Employers' building also led to Madin's appointment by the Calthorpe estate to produce a master plan for its landholdings in Edgbaston, where he designed many important buildings. Low-rise housing in brick was followed by mixed schemes with tall blocks of flats, carefully sited and combined with rich planting. Landscaping also played a part in the offices along the Hagley Road that Madin and his rapidly expanding practice produced into the 1970s, which included his own offices, from 1966, in dark brick, and Neville House, from 1975, clad in mirror glass.
Two other buildings in Egbaston were more monumental still: the BBC's Pebble Mill studios, and the fortress-like Grand Lodge (now Clarendon Suites) for the Warwickshire Lodge of Masons, both completed in 1971. Pebble Mill was demolished in 2005, but the Clarendon Suites exemplify the richness Madin brought to his most prestigious interiors, combining modernism with traditional materials and works of art.
The same contrast between exterior and interior informed Madin's best-known but most controversial buildings, both of them in central Birmingham and under sentence of demolition: the avowedly brutalist National Westminster Bank, opened in 1974, and the Central Library. The latter is the only local authority library in Britain with the scale and stature of a university facility, and its stepped exterior conceals exceptionally calm reference areas, partly of double height.
It was the vigorous campaign to save this building, rejected for listing against the advice of English Heritage and set to be replaced by a new library from the Dutch architects Mecanoo, that led to the work of Madin's practice being re-evaluated, culminating in a monograph by the local architect Alan Clawley. Madin's last public appearance was at the launch of this book in March 2011.
Madin formed a large, multi-disciplinary practice in 1967, the John Madin Design Group, which worked across the West Midlands and in Leeds. It planned the new town of Telford, Shropshire, and extensions to Corby, Northamptonshire. He withdrew through ill-health in 1975 but continued to run its international arm until 1989, working in Europe, the Middle East and the US, mainly for the leisure industry.
A keen sportsman, Madin met his wife, Judith Jackson, on a tennis court. They married in 1956. He was an accomplished water-skier and sailor, and, following a move to Southampton, in 1992 joined the Royal Southern Yacht Club, for which he designed a new clubhouse at his own expense. Sailing holidays with his son and two daughters had earlier led him to the Welsh coast, where in 1965 he acquired a site at Aberdyfi, Gwynedd, to save it from less sensitive development. Over the following 45 years, Aberdovey Hillside Village slowly emerged, with pairs and terraces of flats and houses along the contours. Madin was still working there in 2011.
He is survived by his wife and children.
• John Hardcastle Dalton Madin, architect and planner, born 23 March 1924; died 8 January 2012
The Rev Maurice Walton obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 14, 2012
My uncle Maurice Walton, who has died aged 80, was a founding partner of the architects Stimpson Walton and Bond and left a noticeable mark on his home town of Northampton with his award-winning designs. These included a lift-testing tower, built in concrete for the Express Lift Company, which was opened by the Queen in 1982. The tower attained celebrity status, being referred to by Terry Wogan as the "Northampton Lighthouse". It was listed by English Heritage in 1997 and, at the time, was the youngest building to be listed.
Maurice was born in Northampton and educated at the town's grammar school, which he left at 16 after his headteacher advised him to seek employment. He was happy to remind the incumbent headteacher of this advice when he was invited, as a distinguished old boy, to present prizes more than 50 years later in the school's splendid new hall, which he had designed.
He studied architecture at Liverpool University, graduating in 1953, and set up in practice with Tony Stimpson in 1964. Their commissions encompassed commercial, ecclesiastical and domestic projects, including state-of-the-art homes for himself and his family.
Maurice's design for an extension to Northampton's Victorian guildhall was arguably one of his most striking. He and Alf Bond created a design which complemented rather than copied Edward William Godwin's masterpiece. The new build received a Civic Trust commendation in 1993 along with two other awards for construction using natural stone. In a 2007 survey for the Royal Institute of British Architects, the people of Northampton voted the Guildhall and its extension their most loved building. A gargoyle on the building bearing Maurice's image serves as a lasting reminder of his work.
A lifelong Christian, Maurice was ordained into the church at the age of 63 after many years as a lay preacher and served as a non-stipendiary priest. For eight years he combined his two vocations until his retirement from the church. He continued to work as an architect until December 2010.
He is survived by his wife, Gill, whom he married in 1961; his daughters Kate, Elizabeth and Jane; and his grandsons Frank and Wilf.
Beverly Bernstein obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 13, 2012
My friend and former colleague Beverly Bernstein, who has died aged 72, moved to London from New York with her husband, David, in 1964, intending to spend a year or so in the UK. Instead they stayed and made a significant contribution to architectural education, social housing and development planning around the world.
Beverly's appointment, in her early 20s, to the role of senior registrar at the Architectural Association School coincided with the end of a turbulent period in the AA's history. She became part of the selection process for a new principal, John Lloyd, and was the right person for the new registrar's role. She combined creative management with sound financial sense and the ability to form a young, responsive and fun-loving administrative team. Her reform of the AA's organisation was tested both when negotiations went on for two years on the merger of the AA School with Imperial College, and when they failed, as the AA continued its independent path.
In 1970 she left the AA to follow her development-planning interests, working with Colin Buchanan and Partners and Land Use Consultants. By chance rather than design, she specialised in the development planning of islands and had success in the Seychelles, Malta, the Channel Islands and Saudi Arabia. She edited Habitat International, Housing Review and The Works of Charles Abrams. Together with David Bernstein and David Levitt, she had a significant effect on social housing, helping to create the modern housing association movement and, in 1968, Circle 33 Housing Trust.
She was born Beverly Joan Liden in New York, the daughter of an executive of A&P Stores. She read labour economics at Cornell University and studied European literature under Vladimir Nabokov. She became an economic researcher for the US Conference Board and then the British Institute of Management in London. She married David in 1962.
Beverly was awarded an MPhil in town planning from University College London in 1974 and became a British subject in 1988. In retirement she needed her tennis-playing prowess to counter the efforts of being a restaurant critic of the Hampstead and Highgate Express.
David survives her.
Geoffrey Darke obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 21, 2011
Architect determined to break down barriers in social housing
The architect Geoffrey Darke, who changed the look of social housing, has died aged 82. In a bid to break down the barriers between public and private housing, Darke and his partner John Darbourne designed irregular terraces in homespun brick, which were widely imitated all over Britain.
The pair founded the firm Darbourne and Darke in 1961. It is hard now to imagine the impact of their first project, Lillington Gardens, an estate in Westminster, central London. It adopted the red brick of one of London's finest Victorian churches, GE Street's St James the Less, which the estate surrounds; the church's spire dominates the staggered terraces and internal squares.
Complex plans gave even small flats a dual aspect, and planting boxes on the walkways (watered from the roof) provided colour and interest. Darbourne and Darke felt that these details personalised the large development. It was popular both with critics and residents, and the flats are now greatly sought after, notably by MPs as it is near parliament. A later phase combined maisonettes (with gardens for families) with pensioners' flats on the roof.
Darke was born in Evesham, Worcestershire, where his father was a car mechanic. With encouragement from his parents, he and his brothers won places at Prince Henry's grammar school in Evesham. There, a supportive art teacher helped Darke to secure an RIBA scholarship to the Birmingham School of Architecture in 1947. His first job, for Stevenage Development Corporation, was interrupted by national service in Malaya for the Royal Engineers.
In 1958 he joined the architect Eric Lyons and Darke's housing concerns came to the fore. Lyons designed for the public sector, but is remembered for his flats and houses for the developers Span; Darke assumed a similar rigour in his complex planning, detail, high densities and rich landscaping. It was in Lyons's office that he met Darbourne. Both entered prestigious housing competitions in 1960, Darke in Harlow, Essex, and Darbourne for Lillington Street. Darke secured a commendable second place with his scheme for Bishopsfield and when, in 1961, Darbourne won Lillington Street, in Westminster, he invited Darke to form a partnership.
Darke's hand was most clearly seen in the firm's smaller-scale developments, as good and as admired today as when they were built in the 1960s and 1970s. Meticulous and thorough in his own work, Darke was also responsible for the practice's cheery office ambience. He had a humorous and calming influence that got the best results out of his staff.
After their work on Lillington Gardens, as it became, there were commissions for the London borough of Islington, where Darbourne and Darke repeated Lillington's formula at the Marquess Estate, though the plan proved too complex to be adequately policed. More innovative were infill schemes between Islington's older terraces led by Darke, at Camden Road, Northampton Park and with the best being perhaps Aberdeen Park.
Darke's Worcestershire connections led to a commission for low-rise housing on back-land plots at Pershore, in which he took a personal hand, and which included a library and health centre, other genres in which the practice excelled. The houses were scaled-down versions of Darke's own house in Montpelier Row, Richmond, near the practice's office, whose proportions were carefully related to its Georgian neighbours, but executed without pastiche and in a way that makes the house more spacious than it first appears. It expressed Darke's personality, with glass walls to the office so that he was not cut off from his family, and a superb sound system that reflected the love of music he shared with his wife, Jean, whom he met in the chorus of The Gondoliers and married in 1959. They had one son, Christopher, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Sarah.
The practice's last major housing in Britain was also in Richmond, in Queen's Road, for the London and Quadrant Housing Association, in 1978-88, sensitively grouped and detailed. Darbourne and Darke were one of the few British practices to achieve success in international competitions in the 1970s, with housing in Stuttgart and Hanover, in Germany, and in Bolzano, Italy (1980). Darke concentrated on this housing work, while Darbourne expanded the practice into office work and, through Richard Attenborough, took on the rebuilding of Chelsea FC's Stamford Bridge stadium, never completed.
Darke set up his own practice in 1987 at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where he and Jean could devote more time to music as members of the Festival Chorus. Their music interests continued latterly in Oxford, and they were singing together in a concert only 24 hours before his sudden death. He is survived by Jean and his children.
• Geoffrey James Darke, architect, born 1 September 1929; died 8 November 2011
Alan Haydon obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 2, 2011
Arts administrator who transformed and reopened the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, as a centre for contemporary work
Alan Haydon, who has died aged 61 from cancer, was the director of the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, East Sussex, which he transformed into a major centre for contemporary arts. He had a vision for this modernist architectural gem to be a place where the strands of contemporary culture come together, exploring the spaces where art, film, sound and music converge. As he said: "Our task is to allow artists to work within those spaces and to build bridges for audiences to cross." The De La Warr Pavilion is now renowned for an innovative programme and as a special destination for artists, where one-off performances and collaborations crystallise.
Alan arrived at Bexhill in 1999, just as a lottery bid to support the much-needed refurbishment of the Grade I-listed building had been declined and the likes of the Wetherspoon pub chain were expressing interest in the building. At this time I was a freelancer for the De La Warr, co-ordinating a modest and underfunded visual art and education programme. Alan's single-mindedness, staying power and ability to influence secured not only the building itself, but also set the tenor of the future artistic programme. An Arts Council England award of £4.1m was gained, as well as £1.9m towards restoration and repair from the Heritage Lottery Fund and a further £2m raised from private and public sources. He safeguarded the pavilion's future prospects by overseeing the negotiations for matching revenue funding of more than £1m annually from Rother district council and Arts Council England – a previously unprecedented arrangement at this high level of funding.
The building reopened on 15 October 2005 and attracted more than 500,000 visitors in its first year. Alan orchestrated a bold and distinctive programme including Ian Breakwell, Bill Furlong, Jeremy Deller, Andy Warhol, Nathan Coley, Grayson Perry, Joseph Beuys, Michael Nyman, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson and the Fall.
Alan was born in Lewisham, south-east London. He attended Eltham Green school and studied at Camberwell School of Art (1972-75), under the tutorage of David Troostwyk, a staunch conceptualist. A flirtation with the commercial art market followed, and Alan did a short stint at Sotheby's, but his motivation was more rooted in the democratic potential of art. He moved into the public arts sector, where he remained for the rest of his career, bringing his entrepreneurial spirit to the role of arts centre manager in the London borough of Hammersmith (1977-80), where he kick-started a new arts community space in Shepherd's Bush that included a ceramics studio, recording studio, cinema and theatre.
This led to roles as visual arts officer first in Hammersmith and then for Greater London Arts, where Alan drew up new policies for gallery development, public art and support for artists. He became strategy and regional development officer there between 1989 and 1991, and concentrated on the role of the arts in urban regeneration. Between 1991 and 1993 he was senior visual arts officer at Arts Council England, charged with promoting new policies to support the professional and economic status of the artist.
In 1993 he took up the post of head of visual arts at Northern Arts. Described by a former colleague as a "master facilitator", Alan carefully empowered colleagues without being overly directive – a very delicate balancing act. Lottery funds were becoming available for the first time with Arts Council England as a distributor, and he helped develop lottery-related projects in the north-east.
Alan set the new policy framework for the visual arts and crafts in preparation for the UK Year of the Artist in 1996. This was a sort of mini Cultural Olympiad, with cities and regions able to bid to celebrate the visual arts. The north-east of England became the host for this national celebration and the resulting programme was inspiring: the region now benefits from Baltic and the Sage in Gateshead and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Audacious large-scale commissions were supported by Alan and his team at the Arts Council; these included the Angel of the North by Antony Gormley and Bill Viola's The Messenger, a potent work made in response to the powerful spiritual context of Durham Cathedral.
Alan was an early supporter and board member of Matt's Gallery, in east London, and Locus+, the Newcastle-based artists' commissioning agency. In 1997 he moved south again, to become director of craft development at the Crafts Council, establishing innovative relationships with the Department of Trade and Industry, and the Creative Industries Task Force. Within two years, he had arrived at De La Warr Pavilion.
More a maverick and less a bureaucrat, his success lay as much in his character as his skill and knowledge. He had great presence, was the very best of company, with a wonderful appreciation of food, wine and lively debate, and had a penchant for beautifully tailored and brilliantly coloured corduroy suits.
Alan is survived by his wife Cat and their son Harvey; and by his son Simon, by his first wife, Eliane.
• Alan George Haydon, arts administrator, born 31 October 1949; died 9 October 2011
• This article was amended on 2 November. The caption to the first picture referred to the De La Warr Pavilion as being in the art-deco style. This has been corrected.
Arthur Grogan obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 28, 2011
Selfless collector who helped save Standen for the nation
Arthur Grogan, who has died aged 86, was a discerning collector of late-19th-century British works of art and craftsmanship, an authority on the Arts and Crafts movement and a benefactor of public collections in Britain. Through his timely intervention and a generous donation, he and his wife, Helen, enabled the National Trust to accept Standen, a late-Victorian house in West Sussex designed by the architect Philip Webb, and one of the most remarkable surviving buildings of the period.
In 1972 Standen's owner, Helen Beale, died, bequeathing the house to the National Trust. It had been built for her father in 1895 by Webb, the friend and business partner of William Morris. Unlike most of Webb's buildings, Standen had survived unaltered. It was an example of Victorian design and craftsmanship at its best and most original. The trust wanted to accept the bequest, but was unable to do so because it was accompanied by an inadequate endowment.
Grogan approached the trust with a proposition of exceptional selflessness. He would sell his own house in Richmond, south-west London, make up the endowment by donating the proceeds to the trust and furnish Standen's rather bare walls with his collection of pictures. In exchange, he asked for a lease of the property and the post of honorary curator. The offer was accepted at once and for eight years the Grogans lived happily at Standen, dispensing hospitality and inspiring visitors with their enthusiasm for the period it represented.
Its light-filled rooms were redecorated and hung with Morris wallpapers and, to supplement the Beales' rather humdrum furniture, Grogan began collecting pieces by late-19th-century artists and craftsmen, as well as ceramics and sculpture of the period. Both Arthur and Helen Grogan were still working in London – he as an inspector of historic buildings, she as an architect – and neither ever learned to drive, so it was a measure of their commitment to Standen that each day they travelled to work and back by a laborious combination of buses and trains.
On a summer afternoon in 1977, the official opening of Standen was celebrated by a tea party at which the guest of honour, the historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, gave a memorable speech about the revival of interest in Victorian architecture.
Grogan was a kind and hospitable man, a natural teacher and wonderful company. But he was also highly strung and could be intolerant of those he deemed unsympathetic. At Standen, he fought with the trust's gardener over his taste in trees and the way he mowed the lawn in immaculate lines. After a while, as visitor numbers increased and the strain of living in a show-house began to tell, he asked the trust whether a flat could be created for him and his wife in the disused stables.
Much of the furniture and many of the pictures, textiles and ceramics that Grogan bought for the house had already been given to the trust, but he now proposed that, as payment for the cost of converting the stables, he would donate further pictures from his collection. The trust agreed to the move, but at the time had no mechanism for funding it in the way proposed. As a result, the Grogans left Standen and the trust had to buy the pictures.
It was a sad end to a story that had begun so happily. But most of the items Grogan collected for Standen remain in the house, a permanent reminder of the critical part he and his wife played in saving it and transforming it into a beautiful and absorbingly interesting Arts and Crafts family home that now attracts more than 80,000 visitors a year.
Grogan was born in Hampton Hill, south-west London, the second son of John Grogan, a physicist at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington. His mother, Doris, died giving birth to a daughter. It was a sad household, run by a string of childcarers and housekeepers. Grogan and his brother went first to Pembroke House prep school, and then to King's College, Wimbledon. As Grogan grew up, he developed an interest in antiques of all sorts and spent his spare time combing junk shops and sale rooms for treasures.
On leaving school, he qualified as an architect at Richmond technical college, where he met Helen Sinclair, whom he married in 1951. He obtained a post as an inspector with the Historic Buildings Council, the predecessor of English Heritage. It was a job to which his gifts were ideally suited. His enthusiasm and eye for quality, and a streak of perversity in his nature that drew him to unfashionable causes, were to be of enduring benefit to the cause of building conservation in London.
Grogan was a member of a small team charged with drawing up lists of buildings worthy of statutory protection. At the time, he and Helen were living in Bedford Park, west London, a late-19th-century suburb described by John Betjeman as "probably the most significant in the western world". By the late 1950s this once-fashionable enclave had become down-at-heel and its houses, many of them designed by Richard Norman Shaw, were in multiple occupation. It was through Grogan's dogged advocacy that 356 of them were listed, and he is remembered by the local amenity society as the saviour of Bedford Park.
At the same time he began to collect paintings, watercolours and drawings by 19th-century artists whose work was then as little appreciated as the buildings of Norman Shaw. He claimed that in those days, he never paid more than £5 for a picture. In time, collecting became a passion. He frequented the Fine Art Society in Bond Street and the large Victorian house of Abbott and Holder in Barnes, where bargains were to be had from among unframed works of art stacked in piles. In due course, Grogan assembled a large and distinctive collection of works, mostly by the pre-Raphaelites and members of the New English Art Club.
In his later years, Grogan devoted much time and thought to planning the dispersal of the residue of his collection. By the end of his life, through the Art Fund, he had donated 167 items to public institutions across the country. Twenty-two paintings, including important works by Henry Herbert La Thangue and Sir George Clausen, were given to the Towner art gallery in Eastbourne, East Sussex. A chalk drawing by William Holman Hunt of his wife, Edith, is one of two works that went to Tate Britain, and a charming relief of a mother and child by Robert Anning Bell is one of 17 given to Cheltenham Art Gallery. Fifty pieces were given to the Williamson Gallery in Birkenhead and 49, mostly drawings and watercolours, are now in the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. In all, nine public collections benefited from Grogan's outstandingly generous gift to the nation.
Grogan is survived by his wife.
• Arthur Henry Grogan, art collector, born 31 December 1924; died 25 August 2011
Bill Thomson obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 12, 2011
My friend Bill Thomson, who has died aged 82, was one of that increasingly rare breed of British architects who trained and qualified as town planners. This meant that with one hand he could sketch out a 200-bed resort hotel while the other was busy calculating population cohorts or editing a report.
I first encountered him in a car park on a humid afternoon in Jeddah. His passport had just been stolen. His task in the Saudi capital was somehow to rescue a major urban planning study that had gone horribly wrong. Yet by the same evening, I was convinced that Mr T would sort it out, such was his ability to inspire confidence and trust. And of course, he duly did.
Born in a Glasgow tenement, Bill cut his professional teeth in various architectural practices, in the Scottish new towns of Cumbernauld and East Kilbride, ending his public sector service as chief architect and planning officer of the Basingstoke Development Group.
Then one morning he rang the bell at the London offices of Colin Buchanan and Partners and asked for a job. Thus began 35 years in a central, essential role as a director of the firm, with worldwide projects in Kuwait, the Netherlands, Malta, Algiers, Beirut and Shanghai, as well as UK commissions.
Bill was a defiant one-off, partial to white snakeskin shoes and ties that would not have been out of place on stage at the Glasgow Empire. What made him so special were his qualities of integrity, wisdom lightly worn, a Glasgow gallows humour and a singular ability to marshal the many elements of a complex urban study into a coherent and inspiring project, presented without fear or favour. This was recognised by the RS Reynolds architecture award for his work on the new city of Jubail in Saudi Arabia.
Bill is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, whom he married in 1955, and his children, Karen and Alan.
Imre Makovecz obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 30, 2011
Hungarian architect whose fairytale designs defied soulless Stalinism
The Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz has died at the age of 75. Makovecz headed a loose-knit band of architects, designers and craft workers who established an alternative way of building, thinking and existing during the long years of communist rule and soulless, Soviet-style architecture forced on Hungary and Russia. A fierce critic of communism, materialism and globalism, he was banned from working in Budapest in 1976 and moved north to Visegrád, a beautiful stretch of countryside by the Danube. There, he developed his compelling, idiosyncratic and organic style, borrowing from nature and re-interpreting the ideas of, among others, Rudolf Steiner, Frank Lloyd Wright, Antoni Gaudí and the Hungarian architect ödön Lechner.
Makovecz shaped holiday shelters, restaurants, camping grounds and visitor centres that were as highly charged aesthetically as their purposes were low-key. These designs were what he described as "building beings". Erring on the folkloric and looking a little like trees in children's stories, sprouting arms and sporting faces, they really did feel alive. Wooden shingles might be made to resemble the feathers of a bird's wings. Some buildings appeared to grow like plants. Windows were like eyes.
Makovecz returned to Budapest in the 1980s, after the communism system collapsed, set up his own studio, Makona, and became something of a national hero. Alongside the low-cost community centres he built in villages, and a string of spirited new Roman Catholic churches, he was commissioned to design the Hungarian Pavilion for the Seville Expo of 1992. From the outside, the building resembled a cluster of fairytale church steeples. Inside, real trees were reflected in a mirrored floor. Like so much of Makovecz's work, it was strangely lyrical and curiously beautiful.
Makovecz was born and educated in Budapest. His father was a carpenter. Imre spent much of his boyhood in and around Nagykapornak, to the west of Lake Balaton. He helped his father sabotage German tanks during the second world war. He studied architecture at Budapest's technical university, graduating in 1959. When asked to design a fish restaurant as part of his training, he shaped one in the form of a pair of interlocking fish. His tutors were not amused.
Deeply religious and a lifelong Catholic, Makovecz believed in angels. He sensed a guiding creative spirit in the patterns found in nature, such as the shapes of trees, and in Celtic carvings and Scottish reels. "My buildings and architectural designs do not come from me," he said. "They come from the landscape, from the local environment and from the ancient human spirit."
In the early 1980s, as an assistant editor of the Architectural Review, I went to meet Makovecz in Hungary during a heavy storm. Before travelling, I was interviewed at the Hungarian embassy in London, where Makovecz's name raised eyebrows, not smiles. From a payphone at a railway station in Budapest, I called the Makoveczs' flat with a borrowed coin. I had no idea where their home was and no words of Hungarian beyond igen (yes) and nem (no).
"The first publications about my work to appear in England were written by Jonathan Glancey in the early 1980s," Makovecz later wrote. "I have no idea how he came to know about me … what I am sure of is that Glancey had never before travelled in eastern Europe. He took the train from Vienna and arrived at the Eastern station in Budapest, and was immediately stampeded by a crowd of Arab and Gypsy moneychangers. Out of desperation he finally called us and begged us to come to rescue him. My wife, Marianne, went to pick him up in her Renault 4. She brought him straight home, but even then he was obviously still in a state of shock about the condition of things."
Marianne, a fluent English speaker and talented weaver, introduced me to her extraordinary husband. A profoundly and defiantly individual architect and philosopher, Makovecz was a warm and friendly man with a powerful build, pronounced Magyar moustache and a love of God, Celtic and Scythian culture and Scotch whisky. He was at once fierce and kind, intensely serious and very funny.
I had only known of him through a small, smudged black-and-white photograph of the strangest imaginable interior, published in a Hungarian quarterly that had been among the dozens of international publications that landed on our desks at the Architectural Review's offices in London. The image appeared to show a gloomy and cavernous chamber in the guise of a giant timber ribcage. It proved to be the emotionally charged mortuary chapel of the Farkasréti (Wolf's Meadow) cemetery at the end of Budapest's 59 tramline. Dug into a hillside, the building is a representation of the human chest: coffins are placed at its heart. Béla Bartók and Georg Solti are buried there, and so is Mátyás Rákosi, Hungary's Stalinist dictator.
Makovecz travelled to Britain in the mid-1990s and visited the Prince of Wales at Highgrove. For a moment, it looked as if there might be a Makovecz exhibition in London, but sadly this never happened. Back in Budapest, he went on to design theatres, community halls, university buildings and a sequence of haunting Catholic churches: in Paks (1987) and Százhalombatta (1995), in Hungary, and Csíkszereda (2001), in Romania.
In 2010, he closed his studio and retired to focus on the Hungarian Art Academy he founded in 1992. He was an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and, in 1997, recipient of the gold medal of the Académie d'Architecture.
He is survived by Marianne and three children.
• Imre Makovecz, architect, born 20 November 1935; died 27 September 2011