David Shalev
Architect who worked ‘from the inside out’ and designed Tate St Ives and the Bede Museum, Jarrow
DAVID SHALEV, who has died aged 83, was the architect behind the Tate St Ives art gallery in Cornwall. The building was designed by Shalev and his partner (later wife) Eldred Evans, architects whose style developed from a skilful version of brutalism, to something at the less brash end of postmodernism, to more traditionalist designs. They were known for their skill in imagining interior spaces in three dimensions as they designed them.
Their interiors, often naturally lit, were not coolly symmetrical but continuous progressions with constant changes of direction and level – something that was all the more remarkable as they did not work with computer simulations, but with traditional two-dimensional plans and sections.
“We work from the inside out,” Shalev once explained. “We look at the usefulness and comfort of the inside spaces, and the progression between them. Then the building gradually acquires a form.”
Tate St Ives, commissioned in the late 1980s to house works from the holdings of the Tate in London by the artists who belonged to the St Ives School, reflected the second of their three phases, and its plan owed something to James Stirling’s Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, in which a public route winds up through the building, and in and around a central rotunda.
Nestled into the cliffs overlooking Porthmeor Beach on the site of a defunct gasworks, the gallery, a pristine white structure, was hailed by commentators as a conspicuous success when it opened in 1993, its distinguishing features including full-height windows giving stunning views across the beach, and its open rotunda leading into naturally lit studio-like rooms designed to be no larger than those of the artists whose work they displayed.
David Shalev was born on September 3 1934 in Jerusalem, where his parents had fled from Germany. His mother was a social worker, his father a pharmacist who went on to found a pharmaceutical company in Israel.
After graduating from the Haifa Technion School of Architecture with qualifications in architecture, engineering and planning, he moved to Britain where, among other things, he became an inspiring tutor to generations of students at the Architectural Association between 1963 and 1980, and at Bath University from 1995 until 2001.
In 1965 he set up in private practice in partnership with Eldred Evans, who had studied at the Architectural Association and then at Yale, where she was a contemporary of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers.
Until the 1980s, however, their practice often seemed to be jinxed. They won or were placed second and third in more competitions than almost any British practice, yet few of their designs were built.
Their big break came when plans for a library at the Royal Military College at Shrivenham, for which they had won the design contract, were scrapped in 1982 and the environment secretary Michael Heseltine commissioned them to design new law courts at Truro instead.
It was a bigger job and one that Evans and Shalev tackled with great aplomb, integrating three courts and a complex circulation system around a glazed atrium. It won the Riba Building of the Year for 1988 and has proved very popular with those who use it, including, so it is said, prisoners.
Other commissions included the Bede Museum in Jarrow (1993-2001) and a new library at Jesus College, Cambridge (1994-2000), which, like Tate St Ives, had as its main feature a naturally-lit rotunda – almost a signature of their work.
“One sure test of a fine building is that it is photogenic from every angle,” observed the architectural writer Marcus Binney. “The architects of the new library at Jesus College, Cambridge, have achieved just this.”
David Shalev is survived by Eldred, whom he married in 2001, by their daughter and by a son from an earlier marriage.
David Shalev, born September 3 1934, died January 6 2018