Posts Tagged Obituaries
John Bancroft obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 21, 2011
Architect of the brutalist landmark Pimlico school in central London
Sometimes a single building becomes the focus for an architect's endeavours and reputation. For John Bancroft, who has died aged 82, that building was Pimlico school. Not only did Bancroft design and see this striking landmark of the 1960s through to completion, he also waged an unremitting and lonely struggle for more than a decade to save his cherished creation from destruction, to no ultimate avail.
Pimlico was political from the start. A monument to the comprehensive schooling policies of the Inner London Education Authority and the architectural vagaries of the Greater London council, it was imposed in 1967–70 on a razed and open urban block in the heart of Tory Westminster. A little earlier, and a school in a tower block might have faced off against the surrounding stucco terraces. But by the mid-60s the experts knew what children could do in and to lifts. So Bancroft, the GLC's inhouse job architect, opted for a walk-up building of four storeys only, linear and compact, with a stepped section to maximise daylight. The lowest storey was sunk to the levels of the former townhouse basements. Out of this pit, like a creature in a zoo, grew the concrete-and-glass school, glaring at the rectangle of streets all round. Boxy projecting classrooms with canted glazing, supposedly self-cleaning, completed the brutalist effect of provocation.
Unluckily for Bancroft, Pimlico school was out of date when it opened. Educational ideas change fast, and he had been handed an outdated brief. The bigger spaces worked well, but the classrooms were inflexibly shaped and grouped, while the double-height concourse that was the school's heart was never put to full use after the departure of the enthusiastic first headteacher, Ken Green. Worse, the heating and cooling system was rapidly vandalised, and no lasting solution to the extreme solar gain in the classrooms could be found.
Pimlico soon earned itself a reputation, especially in music and drama, but did so despite its remarkable building, not because of it. When Westminster council, casting greedy eyes upon the site, decided in 1995 to redevelop half of it with luxury flats and create a smaller school on the other half under a PFI scheme, the idea proved hard to combat. Bancroft, by then long retired but always a doughty campaigner, summoned up influential architectural allies and saw the first scheme off, maintaining that simple changes could renew the school. But he was hamstrung by his inability to get Pimlico listed, ministers taking the expedient view that inherent design faults impaired its architectural value. The last remnants of Pimlico school disappeared this year in favour of a faceless substitute.
Bancroft was born in London and brought up in Nottingham. His civil-servant father was an amateur painter and also collected books, a passion which John fully inherited. He started as a draughtsman in a brewery, where someone noticed his talent and persuaded his father to pay for his training at Nottingham University. After national service at Chatham in Kent, he worked for the local borough council there before moving in 1954 to Crawley Development Corporation, in Sussex.
His ambitions took off only when he joined the schools division of the London county council's architects' department in 1957. There, John caused amusement by wearing a smock at the drawing board, but proved his credentials with designs for Elfrida Rathbone (now Haymerle) school, in Peckham, and an extension to Philippa Fawcett college (now Dunraven school), in Streatham. After Pimlico, he was shunted into an administrative role in the housing division, and retired early in 1980.
Though loyal to the public service and collective ethic, Bancroft was at heart an individualist who regarded his calling as a high art with spiritual aims. Critical of most architecture of his day, as early as 1973 he announced, "I am a Victorian at heart." True to his word, he was active in the Victorian Society. Under his leadership a clique called the Dinosaur Five gingered up the GLC in 1979 to oppose a plan by the Natural History Museum to destroy the side galleries of their Grade I-listed building. The campaign's climax was a cake baked in the shape of the museum, from which Spike Milligan cut the threatened galleries before the attendant press. An alternative scheme devised by Bancroft helped save them.
During his retirement he was involved in the restorations of HMS Warrior, then at Hartlepool and now at Portsmouth, and of the SS Great Britain at Bristol. He also designed premises for Howes' Bookshop at Hastings, the source of many acquisitions decking his walls at Haywards Heath in Sussex.
John was a gravel-voiced character with streaks of grit and obstinacy but liberal views and a saving sense of humour. He is survived by his fourth wife, Janet, and by a daughter, Sarah, from his second marriage.
• John Bancroft, architect, born 28 October 1928; died 29 August 2011
Stephen Clark obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 29, 2011
In 1966, my father, Stephen Clark, who has died aged 97, was appointed company secretary of C & J Clark, his family's shoe business in Street, Somerset. He remained with Clarks until his retirement in 1975.
Born in Street, Stephen was educated at the Quaker Bootham school in York; Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania; and King's College, Cambridge. Aged 21, he started working for the Avalon Leatherboard Company in Street. The company, which was associated with Clarks, made board for use in insoles. In 1941, he became manager of the company, where he was instrumental in innovations such as Articor, a board consisting of ground-up leather bound with latex. Under his stewardship, the company became profitable after years of loss-making.
Stephen's passion was for preserving historic buildings. In 1962, he bought a house in Somerset named Ston Easton Park in order to prevent it from falling into ruin. He sold it in 1964 to the journalist William Rees-Mogg. With the proceeds he bought Bowlish House, a fine but dilapidated house in Shepton Mallet. He restored it and opened a restaurant there, which still exists.
He also rescued a porch from another historic house which was to be demolished, and re-erected it in a field opposite Bowlingreen Mill in Street, with a fine avenue of walnut trees leading to it. He said his proudest achievement was planting an avenue of poplars along the road leading from the mill to Glastonbury.
In the US, Stephen was elected a trustee of Woodlawn Trustees, founded by his grandfather, William Poole Bancroft, for the preservation of open space for public enjoyment in Wilmington, Delaware, and the vicinity, as well as the provision of affordable rental housing. He was passionately committed to his grandfather's vision and, after retiring from Clarks, served as president of Woodlawn Trustees from 1976 to 1988.
Stephen was a beautiful ice skater and swam regularly in the rivers around Street. He also spent much of his time riding. His brother Nathan, who created the bestselling desert boot, died three weeks after him at the age of 94. Stephen is survived by his wife, Marianna, me and my sisters Lydia and Alice, his son Henry, 11 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
Maurice Craig obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 2, 2011
The architectural historian Maurice Craig has died aged 91 in Dublin, the city towards whose conservation he dedicated much of his energy. During the late 1950s, Maurice defended the Georgian architectural legacy of the city against barbaric development plans which would have destroyed the memory of "colonial Dublin" some 40 years after independence. Maurice successfully alerted public opinion to oppose the plans. We first met at one of the meetings for the campaign.
Born in Belfast and brought up as a Prebysterian, Maurice went to Cambridge University, where he occupied the same room at Magdalene College once used by the politician Charles Stewart Parnell. He continued his studies at Trinity College Dublin, where he completed his doctorate on the poet Walter Savage Landor.
From 1952 to 1970, he was an inspector of ancient buildings at the Ministry of Works in London, specialising in the protection of British monuments which had survived the war. Always appreciative of traditional skills that were being lost, Maurice enjoyed model-making, in which he demonstrated his admiration for the engineering of old steamships. He also took delight in his handbuilt French limousine, a vintage Delage.
His publications included Dublin 1660-1860: The Shaping of a City and a study of mausoleums. Another consuming interest was decorative Irish bookbinding, and he published the standard history on the subject in 1954. His most personal book was The Elephant and the Polish Question, whose incongruous title reflected the diversity of subjects, from literature to cats, within its pages.
A hospitable man with strong beliefs, Maurice married three times. He is survived by his children, Catherine and Michael, and stepchildren, Sean, Mark and Antonia.
Cecil Lush obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 31, 2011
My father, Cecil Lush, who has died of pneumonia aged 92, established his own architectural practice in London in 1949. In 1956 he was joined by Alfred Lester in founding Lush & Lester, which over the next 25 years was responsible for many award-winning projects in the capital. These included Nansen Village students' accommodation in Woodside Park; the residential development of Vane Close, Mulberry Close and Vane Mews in Hampstead; One Gardiners Corner in the City; Inter-City House in Whitechapel; and the Russian Trade Delegation building in Highgate. As architects for the Burton fashion group, Lush & Lester oversaw more than 100 Evans and Burton shops. They also built synagogues in Brondesbury, Mill Hill and Newbury Park, and houses throughout the UK.
For 27 years until his retirement in 1989, Cecil was architect to King Alfred school in Hampstead, which my brother Peter and I attended, with key buildings designed including the science and arts block and gymnasium. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1968.
Cecil was born in London and went to Christ's College school in Finchley. He was articled to Welch and Lander in 1935, who were influenced by Le Corbusier, and whose clients included London Underground and the London county council. At the outbreak of the second world war, Cecil was one of the first Jewish men to enlist in the Royal Engineers. Following distinguished service in France, including the exodus from Dunkirk, and in Burma and India, ascending to the rank of major, Cecil returned to London and studied for his architecture degree from 1946 at Regent Street Polytechnic (now part of the University of Westminster) before establishing his own practice. In 1952 he married Dolly Weisbort, a child psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic.
After retirement, Cecil retained a keen interest in architecture. He was pleased that although neither of his sons inherited his talent for draughtsmanship, we both became involved in social housing and regeneration. He was interested in cinema and opera, and wrote and had privately published Family Memories 1808-2002; this featured his war service and has been used by the Imperial War Museum and local museums in north London.
Cecil suffered a devastating stroke in 2005 but recovered sufficiently to enjoy visits from his family and many friends. He is survived by Peter and me, and three grandchildren. Dolly died in 2010.
Selwyn Goldsmith obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 31, 2011
Author of Designing for the Disabled
Selwyn Goldsmith, who has died aged 78, was the author of Designing for the Disabled (1963), a comprehensive architectural planning manual providing guidance on access for disabled people to facilities and buildings. This was an entirely new concept in the UK at the time.
When he was commissioned to write the second, expanded, edition of the book, published in 1967, he selected Norwich as a representative city for his research. He studied the local population and based his findings on their experience. He interviewed 284 wheelchair users, and carried out detailed analyses to develop his hypotheses. A significant initiative arising from his research was the concept of the dropped kerb: 15 were installed at intersections around the city and this facility is now a feature of urban landscapes throughout the world.
Born in Newark, Nottinghamshire, he was educated at Abbotsholme school, Staffordshire, and read architecture at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, completing his qualification at the Bartlett School, University College London, in 1956. He contracted polio immediately afterwards, which resulted in his being paralysed on one side of his body.
Goldsmith then met Bill Allen and Duncan Guthrie, from the Polio Research Fund, and Gordon Ricketts, the secretary of the Royal Institute of British Architects. They developed the idea behind Designing for the Disabled.
After a spell as buildings editor at the Architects' Journal, Goldsmith joined the Department of the Environment. In 1981, he produced reports on mobility housing, and was a key figure in the international year of disabled people. In 1982, he became the first architect to receive the prestigious Harding award, for his services to disabled people.
He was appointed to the Prince of Wales Advisory Group on Disability (now The Disability Partnership), and his international reputation led to numerous invitations to address architects, therapists and government bodies throughout the world, and particularly in the Netherlands.
In 1989, Goldsmith turned his attention to the question of women's lavatories, asking why women always seemed to have to queue in public buildings. He conscripted his wife, Becky, whom he had married that year, to assist his research with many visits to shops, museums and theatres. Their findings revealed a massive disparity in the provision of male and female toilets. The research was published in the Times and professional journals; it was also included in a major survey of sanitary provision written by Goldsmith for the Department of the Environment. He called a subsequent article on the subject "Ps and Queues".
In 1992, Goldsmith retired from the DoE, and set about writing a new book, Designing for the Disabled – The New Paradigm. Partly autobiographical, this work focused on the needs of wheelchair users, ambulant disabled people, children and families with pushchairs. In 2000, he published his last book, Universal Design.
I first encountered him in 1962, and we worked together many times in the ensuing years. He was never an easy person to deal with; he held strong views and enjoyed nothing more than an argument, always tempered with his zany sense of humour. He displayed an honesty that made him unpopular in some circles, but his integrity and charm won him great respect even among those with whom he battled.
He is survived by Becky, two sons from his first marriage, and three grandchildren.
• Selwyn Goldsmith, architect and disability rights campaigner, born 11 December 1932; died 3 April 2011
John McCracken obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 19, 2011
Minimalist artist whose bold, shiny creations reflected their surroundings
It is sometimes said that Stanley Kubrick derived the mysterious monolith in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey from the steles – upright stones, slabs or columns – in the art of the American west coast minimalist John McCracken, who has died aged 76. The leitmotif of the 1968 film was the portentous theme of Richard Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra; of McCracken's work, the hip music of the Beach Boys would be about right. The colour of the monolith in 2001 was louring black; McCracken did black too, but glowing with good health in the same spirit as his bubblegum pinks.
McCracken said that surfboards were in the back of his mind while he worked pigment on to what he called his planks (which they frequently were) until he attained the high-gloss finish of an automobile. His aim was the polar opposite of Frank Lloyd Wright and the American arts and crafts movement: instead of humanising mass production, he laboured as a craftsman to reproduce the finish of mass-produced articles.
"What you see is what you get," although an early maxim of advanced design software, was often heard from the mouths of minimalists as well. The solemn breed of critic who gravitates towards minimal art argues that by standing on the floor, but leaning against the wall, the planks bridge the gap between sculpture and painting, an observation that everyone else recognises as piffle.
The planks do something, but the something is intrinsic to the qualities McCracken invests them with, beautiful colour and a high shine. What happens next is a happy conjunction with the space they are placed in, and they are at their best when the space combines clean lines, white walls, pale grey floors and top lighting – such as David Zwirner's gallery in Manhattan, where McCracken had the last of a series of shows in September 2010 and where the highly buffed shine picked up the geometry of floor and wall, as much in the candy colours as in the mirrored steel and the glowing blacks.
The reflections on the steles and poles and cubes standing in series or leaning against the wall always make the work seem transparent, a disconcerting quality that is a street's distance from the severe sequences of boxes by Donald Judd or the inert bricks of Carl Andre.
You would imagine that there are easier ways of making a living than all this drudgery, but perhaps McCracken picked up this gene from his father who, when he was not a cattle rancher, was an engineer in Berkeley, California, where John was born.
He grew up in northern California, where he graduated from high school before serving for four years with the US navy. He then studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. There, he married his first wife, with whom he had two sons, David and Patrick.
It was the 1950s, so the obligatory style was abstract expressionism, but McCracken worked his way backwards to the example of Stuart Davis, the American modernist whose most famous painting was Lucky Strike (1921), a precursor of Claes Oldenburg's pop art. Pop was the area where McCracken made his next raid, not for the content but for an abstraction from it, the bold configuration and the comic-book colours; an abstraction that he finally adapted to work in relief.
When he had a highly popular exhibition at the Edinburgh festival in 2009, McCracken was asked to describe his show in five words. He replied: "Minimal, maximal, 3D, colour, space." Four of those categories are common to a lot of post-second world war art; maximal referred to the paintings that McCracken made intermittently – surfaces of intricate devices based, he said, on Hindu mandalas (circular designs symbolising the universe).
McCracken was lean and good-looking, with a touch of Clint Eastwood about him, and his gait was like a film star's playing a cowboy. Maybe that came from his father. As he became successful on both the west and east coasts (not to mention London, where the Lisson Gallery has spaces as sympathetic to McCracken's art as Zwirner's in Manhattan), he lived alternately in New York and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
He is survived by his second wife, Gail Barringer, who is also an artist; his sons, David and Patrick; a stepdaughter, Suzanne; his sisters, Margaret and Pamela; and three step-grandchildren.
• John Harvey McCracken, artist, born 9 December 1934; died 8 April 2011
Leo Steinberg obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 13, 2011
Art historian and critic known for his elegant investigations of Renaissance paintings
Leo Steinberg, who has died aged 90, was one of the most brilliant and original art historians of his generation. He wrote as persuasively about the great Renaissance masters as he did about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. His best-known work was The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983).
I was lucky enough to meet Leo in 1955, and over the decades we continued to see each other – in New York, where he lived for most of his adult life, or on his visits to London. He was impatient of small talk or gossip; conversation was always about particular works of art, which he would discuss intensely. What he said was charged with a sense that art was of overwhelming importance: "anything anyone can do, painting does better".
That passionate involvement with a specific work, and the intelligence which fed it, made him not only an engrossing interlocutor but also a dazzling lecturer (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, tickets for his lectures sold out on the day they went on sale). He was invited to deliver the prestigious Mellon lectures at the National Gallery in Washington DC (1982) and the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University (1995-96).
He was a devoted teacher, concerned about his students, whose careers he followed. From 1961 to 1975, he was professor of art history at Hunter College, in New York, and then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was Benjamin Franklin professor until his retirement in 1991.
Though firmly identified with the New York art scene, Leo was born in Moscow, where his father, Isaac, a distinguished lawyer, was briefly Lenin's minister of justice. Isaac's radical views (he wanted to shut down all prisons) soon led to his dismissal and emigration to Berlin after threats of assassination.
Leo's childhood in Berlin left him with a barely noticeable German inflection to the otherwise impeccable English formed in his adolescence, since the arrival of the Nazis forced another displacement – to London. There, he finished his schooling and studied sculpture at the Slade. He moved to New York with his family soon after the end of the second world war.
In New York, he worked as a freelance writer and translator, studied philosophy and taught life drawing at Parsons school of art. He embarked on a doctoral thesis at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. His study of the diminutive and intricate Roman baroque church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, designed by Francesco Borromini, set out the formal devices employed by the architect to engage the passerby's unsuspecting attention.
While working on his thesis, Leo published criticism in arts magazines and became the most articulate spokesman of the rising New York School of painters. His early advocacy of Rauschenberg and Johns was committed but jargon-free, and he was one of the few critic-historians whose essays were eagerly read by artists for their clarity and elegance. His criticism was collected in a book of essays, Other Criteria: Confrontations with 20th-Century Art, in 1972.
But for all this involvement, he was not really acquisitive and lived rather frugally. In 2002, he donated his collection of 3,200 prints (mostly from the 16th and 17th centuries, but also works by Picasso and Matisse) to the museum of art at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1986 he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship (known as the "genius" grant).
He continued to be prolific, writing with equal enthusiasm about Pontormo and Picasso. The examination of a work was never approached on merely formal terms – although he was a painstaking analyst, always meticulous in his attention to detail, to the way brushwork was used to fragment or to mould space; he would even investigate the implications of words pasted on the printed scraps of collages (treated as abstract patterns by most art historians) in his search for clues to the artist's intention.
Leo was impatient with any criticism which merely analysed the object presented to the spectator, since what really interested him was why the artist had wanted to do it in the first place. This is the key to The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. The book is concerned with what Leo termed "ostentatio genitalium", the display of the genitals which often figured in devotional paintings or engravings of the Renaissance and which had been "tactfully overlooked for half a millennium". He argued that the prominence of Christ's genitals was a presentation of incarnational theology explicit in the sermons and pious literature of the time, in which the blood shed at the circumcision is considered the first offering of the redemptive sacrifice.
It was the embodying of an idea which historians, oscillating between prudishness and pornography, found embarrassing or far-fetched. The book was received with bemused deference at the time; however, it has recently been reprinted with an account of the controversy and has transformed our understanding of Renaissance art, while his reading was confirmed in an appendix to the book by the Jesuit theologian John O'Malley.
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were the artists who preoccupied him in his later years; Michelangelo's sculpture of the naked Christ in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, to which the church added a loincloth, was one of the key works discussed in The Sexuality.
His book Michelangelo's Last Paintings, on the frescoes of the Conversion of St Paul and the Crucifixion of St Peter in the Cappella Paolina, in the Vatican, appeared in 1975. In 2001, he published Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper, a subtle re-examination of the most famous of Renaissance frescoes, in which he pointed to the combining of the forewarning of betrayal and the institution of the Eucharist which followed it.
When I visited him last year – we both knew we might not meet again – he dismissed the matter of his health in the first few minutes, but for an hour and a half we talked of Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, a circular painting of the holy family, in the Uffizi, Florence. We discussed the affectionate embrace of the figures, and the naked youths who people its background. He was writing an extended essay on the painting and thought that he would leave it unfinished, a fragment.
Leo married Dorothy Seiberling in 1962; the marriage ended in divorce. For more than 40 years, he was much helped by a devoted assistant, Sheila Schwartz. He is survived by his nephews and nieces.
• Zalman Lev ("Leo") Steinberg, art historian, born 9 July 1920; died 13 March 2011
• This article was amended on 13 April 2011. The original stated that Leo Steinberg had also been married to Phoebe Lloyd, and that he was helped by Sheila Schwartz 'in his later years'. These points have been corrected.
Terry Ball obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 23, 2011
Reconstruction artist whose drawings grace many historic sites and guidebooks
For the millions of people visiting ruined medieval castles and monasteries each year, reconstruction drawings can reveal the former glories of the architecture and throw light on the vanished ways of life within their ancient walls. Terry Ball, who has died aged 79, was one of Britain's best-known and most influential artists in this field.
Terry's works were not "artistic impressions", but carefully considered and meticulously argued reconstructions. A painting such as that of the great hall at St Davids Bishop's Palace in Pembrokeshire could take him months to complete. The process began with a lengthy discussion on site, choosing the most appropriate viewpoint and considering the missing elements of architectural detail, such as the form of the roof. Draft after draft would then follow, with Terry posing questions to his collaborating historian, ensuring the accuracy of detail for the proposed date of reconstruction. Over some four decades, Terry's wonderfully distinctive and richly informative paintings have graced the pages of books (notably guidebooks), exhibitions and display panels at many historic sites.
He was born in Greenwich, south-east London, the second son of Albert Ball and his wife, Mary, who was known as Dink. Though he was christened William Thomas, his mother always preferred the name Terry and it stuck with him all his life. The family had deep Irish roots of which Terry was proud. He went to school in Carshalton, south London. His mother fostered his interest in art and, after the second world war, during which he was evacuated to north Wales, Terry went to Wimbledon School of Art. In the autumn of 1952, he began studies at the Royal College of Art in London, where his contemporaries included Frank Auerbach and Bridget Riley. He spent hours drawing buildings and architectural features, never imagining this would lead to a career.
On graduating, Terry took a job as a hospital orderly. He hoped to paint enough work in his spare time to give him an exhibition. In 1957, he went to Jericho, where he joined the archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, drawing finds recovered from her excavations. He fell in love with Palestine and its people, spending long stretches of time there over the next 10 years. His nephew, Steven, recalls his homecomings: a romantic character with a streak of mystery, smelling of oil paint and strong French cigarettes.
It was during the restoration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem that Terry first grasped the value of reconstruction drawings. One of his earliest works, drawn during the six-day war in 1967, shows the famous church as it was rebuilt in the 1040s.
Returning to London, Terry took a job with the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, in the ancient-monuments drawing office. He eventually ran the office, as part of the body that was transformed into English Heritage in 1983. By this time, Terry's talent had emerged, with his growing interest in reconstructions. He honed his skills with drawings of the Guildhall in London, the Tower of London and Windsor Castle. Through the 1980s, the drawings became part of his official duties, and the volume of work increased as he painted castles, palaces, abbeys and prehistoric monuments. Collaborating with colleagues in the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments, Terry was able to show, for example, how Richmond Castle might have looked in 1400, or how extensive Rievaulx Abbey was in 1530. By the 1990s, he was also producing a significant body of work for the Welsh heritage body, Cadw.
Small of stature, Terry was a man of perfect manners. In later life he always cut a dapper artistic figure in his waistcoat and corduroy trousers. He was an avid conversationalist, and could hop between Middle Eastern politics, literature (Marcel Proust, Bertolt Brecht and the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam were favourites) and, of course, art. He was also a prolific letter writer.
In 1992, he was appointed MBE – which his mother only discovered when casually reading the published newspaper lists – and was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He later moved to Walberswick, Suffolk, with his long-term partner, Christine Sutton. There he became active in the local circle of artists, continuing to paint reconstructions but concentrating on portraits and beautiful, haunting landscapes.
He is survived by Christine, two nephews and a niece.
• William Thomas (Terry) Ball, reconstruction artist, born 14 August 1931; died 23 February 2011
Peter Thursby obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 21, 2011
British sculptor of works ranging in scale from the monumental to the domestic
The sculptor Peter Thursby, who has died aged 80, produced his first work in the wake of the second world war, a time when new and brutal abstract art came into being, challenging the semi-abstract and the figurative. His early sculptures were hard and aggressive, with form sacrificed to surface qualities. In time a more human modernism took over. His work ranged in scale from the architectural and monumental to small pieces for domestic interiors. He worked with a range of materials, from cast concrete, stone and slate to bronze, stainless steel, aluminium and silver.
His father was an army officer, and Peter had a rather military bearing himself. His handshake was firm, and his manners and his attire (when not in the studio) were both impeccable. He was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and his childhood was spent in Jamaica. Back in England, he attended Bishop Wordsworth's school in Salisbury. The author William Golding was his English teacher, and Peter remembered Golding provoking his pupils into "thinking" – something that was not normally on the curriculum.
After doing his national service, he began to study art at St Paul's College of Education in Cheltenham (now Gloucestershire University). He then studied with Paul Feiler and Ernest Pascoe at the West of England College of Art. Attending their life classes honed his natural drawing skills and laid down the ideas which informed his first sculptures.
At Exeter College of Art and Design (1954-60), the teacher Edward Atkinson stimulated Peter's interest in sculpture. Throughout the 1950s Peter's output was almost exclusively in the form of paintings. By 1957 his canvases had become not only richly textural, but also fully abstract. His small series of red, black and grey paintings entitled Metal Objects in Space was praised in La Revue Moderne. His switch to sculpture was marked with early success when, in 1962, he won first prize in an exhibition held in Gloucester entitled 19 Young Sculptors.
Referencing the human form, Peter's early totemic sculptures were dark, coruscating pieces. These evolved into winged creatures thrusting into space. Marjorie Parr bought one winged creature at his solo exhibition at Plymouth Art Gallery in 1964, and he showed regularly at the Parr gallery. Gradually his organic sculptures became subsumed by the mechanical. New bronze table-sculptures took on a resemblance to assemblages of engine parts. Not all of his audience was convinced, although Eduardo Chillada, Eduardo Paolozzi and César Baldaccini were also engaged in making sculpture from reclaimed materials.
Peter made a number of tensile, poised aluminium sculptures, their linear forms in tune with new modernist architecture. They foreshadowed Peter's large public sculptures of the 1980s. Cast in bronze by the Morris Singer Foundry, these monumental works, weighing up to three tonnes, were erected in the US, Germany and the UK. Water was brought in to flow over many of them, creating movement, light reflection and sound.
Peter was not averse to semi-figurative work if he felt the subject called for it. Such was the case for his 1970s Podmen sculptures and his later Sarum series and Flight series. Intrigued by satellites and space travel, he produced a number of ringed and domed sculptures in the 1970s and 1980s, works which both reflected and refracted light. He also made a successful Tower series in which sculpture becomes architecture.
A good communicator, he gave generously of his time to art education and arts organisations, including the Royal West of England Academy, of which he was president for five years (1995-2000). In 1995 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West of England, Bristol.
I first met Peter when working on his biography with Simon Olding. For me, his Optimism series from the 1990s (one of which is now in the Queen's collection) came to epitomise him. His optimism was a paramount energising force, along with his deep Christian faith, and both helped him to create a body of work that is recognised as a significant contribution to 20th-century sculpture.
He is survived by his wife, Maureen, whom he married in 1956.
• Peter Lionel Thursby, sculptor, 23 December 1930; died 6 January 2011
Antonina Pirozhkova obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 1, 2010
Russian engineer and wife of the writer Isaac Babel, whose legacy she fought to preserve
Antonina Pirozhkova, who has died aged 101, was the leading female engineer during the construction of the Moscow metro in the 1930s. But she had an even bigger role as first the wife of the writer Isaac Babel and, following his death in 1940, the custodian of his legacy.
Pirozhkova was born in the Siberian village of Krasny Yar and showed early academic ability, helping her widowed mother at the age of 14 by tutoring other children in mathematics. By the age of 21 she was a qualified engineer and two years later she moved to Moscow. She was given a job by the newly formed Metrostroi company and helped design some of the most famous "underground palaces" in the Soviet capital, including the stations Mayakovskaya, Paveletskaya, Kievskaya, Arbatskaya and Ploshchad Revolyutsii. In 1964 she published the standard Soviet engineering textbook, Tunnels and Metros.
Pirozhkova met Babel in 1932 and they formed a relationship that lasted seven years. Their daughter, Lidiya, was born in 1937. As with many Soviet couples of the era, their marriage did not depend on a formal declaration or ceremony. The Soviet authorities later recognised Pirozhkova as Babel's widow and heir.
Outwardly it was an unusual pairing: a young Siberian engineer and a bespectacled Jewish writer, who was 15 years older and already had a daughter by his first wife and a son from a relationship with the actress Tamara Kashirina. Pirozhkova was an anchor for Babel as he faced political and artistic isolation. The couple disliked the Moscow literary scene and Babel was proud of his partner's highly skilled job. He turned down invitations on her behalf: "She is a working woman; she has no time."
In 1924 Babel had been hailed by Pravda as "the rising star of our literature". Saying he had "no imagination", he chose to experience the new Soviet era at first hand, living in Odessa's gangster neighbourhood, the Moldavanka, and riding with General Semyon Budyonny's Red Cavalry in the Soviet-Polish war in 1920. This was the material for the original and phenomenally successful short-story collections Odessa Stories (1923) and Red Cavalry (1926). But by the time he met Pirozhkova, his vivid modernist style and natural nonconformism were much less welcomed and, as he himself sardonically put it, he began cultivating "the genre of silence".
As the Stalinist repression worsened, Babel characteristically tried to play by different rules. He kept up his links with his first family, in France, had an Austrian lodger and rashly attended a salon hosted by Yevgenia Yezhova, the wife of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the secret police, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (the NKVD, which became the KGB). His luck finally ran out on the night of 15 May 1939, when he was arrested on trumped-up charges (spying for foreign powers, being a Trotskyist agent) at his dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow. Babel and Pirozhkova were driven into the city and parted at the gates of the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the secret police.
Babel was shot on 27 January 1940, although his death was confirmed to Pirozhkova only in 1954 and the correct date was concealed from her for another 30 years. Pirozhkova was isolated, although allowed to keep her job. As an evacuee in the Black Sea region of Abkhazia with her daughter during the second world war, she ran the engineering team building the railway tunnels there.
Pirozhkova later said with regret: "From the beginning Babel frightened me and told me I shouldn't read what had not been finished. He said: 'I'll write it and then read it to you myself.' So even when something lay open and I passed the desk, I tried not to look at it." She began a campaign to reclaim a decade's worth of Babel's unpublished work, which had been confiscated during his arrest.
In 1989 the literary researcher Vitaly Shentalinsky discovered that the NKVD had seized 15 folders of manuscripts, 18 notebooks and pads, 517 letters, postcards and telegrams and 245 various loose sheets of paper from his apartment alone. They included all Babel's letters to Pirozhkova. In 1987 two officers from the Lubyanka visited her and told her that all of this had been burned. It was later suggested that this was not true.
In 1965 Pirozhkova retired to devote herself to Babel's legacy. In 1972 she oversaw the publication of the first reminiscences about him by writers such as Ilya Ehrenburg and Konstantin Paustovsky and finally (in 1990) a two-volume edition of Babel's collected works.
Pirozhkova's own memoir of her life with Babel, By His Side, was published abroad after the end of the Soviet Union, with a Russian-language edition finally coming out in uncensored form in 2001. Her reminiscences about some of the remarkable contemporaries she had known, such as the film director Sergei Eisenstein, remained unpublished at the time of her death.
In 1996, Pirozhkova emigrated to the US, where she lived with Lidiya and her grandson, Andrei, who survive her.
• Antonina Nikolayevna Pirozhkova, engineer and writer, born 1 July 1909; died 12 September 2010