Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
clockwise from top left: Robert Venturi, Will Alsop, MJ Long, David Watkin. Paul Virilio and Neave Brown.
‘They all shared the conviction that the design of buildings is a profound human activity’: (clockwise from top left) Robert Venturi, Will Alsop, MJ Long, David Watkin. Paul Virilio and Neave Brown. Photographs: AP, Getty, Rolfe Kentish Long & Kentish Architects, Gareth Gardner
‘They all shared the conviction that the design of buildings is a profound human activity’: (clockwise from top left) Robert Venturi, Will Alsop, MJ Long, David Watkin. Paul Virilio and Neave Brown. Photographs: AP, Getty, Rolfe Kentish Long & Kentish Architects, Gareth Gardner

The architects and design pioneers we lost in 2018

This article is more than 5 years old

Will Alsop, Robert Venturi, MJ Long and more – in 2018 we lost some hugely influential architects, designers and thinkers who transformed the places in which we live, work and play

If there were a paradise, or a purgatory, or wherever else architects might go after they die, the atmosphere in its waiting room would be spiky this year. For 2018 has been a year of losses of strong, distinctive and argumentative minds. Those losses happen to run the gamut of ideas of what architecture can be. If these individuals had never lived, the built environment would be considerably less rambunctious, refined, historical, forward-looking, witty, public-spirited, entertaining and inspiring.

One pair of opposites is Will Alsop, who used big, splashy paintings as a way to design big, splashy buildings, and the German-born Florian Beigel, patron saint of the group sometimes known as “the Whisperers”, for whom subtle and nuanced drawings led to buildings with the same qualities. For Beigel, who made his name with a building for the Half Moon theatre in east London, an architect’s role was to design “the rug, but not necessarily the picnic” – to create the setting for the enjoyment of life that is not itself the main event. Alsop’s architecture – such as a design school in Toronto levitating on 26 metre-high stilts, or Peckham library in south London – is rug and picnic, hamper, plates, wine bottles, cutlery, corkscrew and all, rolled into one.

Will Alsop’s striking Peckham library. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Without Neave Brown there would not have been some of the finest and boldest public housing in postwar Britain, with the Alexandra Road estate in Camden; whose appeal to a new generation drew a sold-out audience to hear him speak at the 1,275-seat Hackney Empire theatre shortly before his death. Most of those present looked in wonder at the way Brown applied his art to the pressing social needs of their time, and wished that they could do the same. Without the Philadelphian Robert Venturi the style known as postmodernism would have lost much of its guiding intelligence. The books he wrote or co-wrote, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas, liberated architecture from the stays of modernism. They gave a freedom to be paradoxical that allowed the likes of Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry and Herzog and de Meuron to prosper.

A Venturi-less world would also have lacked the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, where the classical facade of the original building is continued on to the new extension, but then folded, sliced and subverted with seemingly incongruous elements. It was the solution that emerged from the row that started when Prince Charles called an earlier proposal for the site a “monstrous carbuncle”, which to some, my own younger self included, made it seem a messy compromise. Now, in addition to the fact that the galleries for the permanent collection are superb, it looks like a smart way to make architecture out of the messy politics that surrounded it.

Neave Brown’s Alexandra Road estate in Camden: ‘some of the finest and boldest public housing in postwar Britain’. Photograph: Tim Crocker

Venturi himself would not have been the same without his partnership with his wife, Denise Scott Brown, who is very much still alive. As she and he never stopped reminding everyone, their works were as much hers as his, but theirs was an epoch which assumed that in an architectural couple the man must be the leader. It’s an epoch that possibly hasn’t gone away. In any case, MJ (Mary Jane) Long found it professionally useful to go by her non-gender-specific initials: she was, for example, convinced that a travel scholarship that she won early in her career was given on the assumption that she was male. Among her achievements were a series of studios for artists including RB Kitaj and Frank Auerbach, and her role in the British Library, designed with her husband, Colin St John Wilson. She came up with the plan for what was Britain’s largest building of the 20th century in the time allowed by her young children sleeping. So protracted was the project’s realisation that they had grown up and left home before it was officially opened in 1998.

The British Library, London, designed by MJ Long and Colin St John Wilson. Photograph: Getty Images

It’s part of the nature of architecture that it is not only shaped by architects. This year’s losses include Alan Davidson who, as a pioneer of the digital visualisation of buildings through his company Hayes Davidson, transformed the way they are conceived, sold, debated and therefore built, it being inevitable that architects design buildings so that they look good in whatever medium of representation they are portrayed. There was also Simon Harris, who as a property agent quietly introduced some of the best architects of his time – most notably Norman Foster to the project that became the Gherkin – to the conservative world of commercial development. If it is now commonplace for the likes of Foster to design large office projects, it was Harris who made it so.

Signy Svalastoga, as head of the Sir John Cass School of Architecture, was an inspiring educator of budding architects. Peter Davey, as editor of the Architectural Review for 25 years, helped sustain the profession’s sometimes flimsy conscience. Colin Amery, writer and conservationist, helped save much of Georgian Spitalfields and of old St Petersburg. He was also instrumental, as an adviser to the National Gallery, in getting Venturi and Scott Brown appointed to design the Sainsbury Wing. These architects and architectural midwives didn’t agree with each other or, in some cases, like one another, but certain threads connect them. Alsop, Beigel and a few others were connoisseurs of a good meal, no matter what the setting. Brown and Venturi, in their different ways, wanted to make buildings that stepped outside the rarefied climate of specialist discourse and spoke directly to those who used them.

Most importantly they all shared the conviction that the design of buildings is a profound human activity, that it requires striving and battling, that its effects can be transformative. If you erased their collective effect from modern cities – the buildings they designed, influenced, preserved or championed – they would be duller and more meagre places.

Lastly, one more odd couple at the pearly gates: Paul Virilio, a French philosopher and architectural theorist who was fascinated with war and calamity, and David Watkin, a Cambridge historian whose 1977 book Morality and Architecture was a manifesto of the traditionalist reaction against modernism. Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology, published two years earlier, revealed a fascination with the strange, sinister and melancholic concrete structures that the German occupiers built to maintain their grip on France. What he and Watkin would have to say to each other, God only knows.

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed