Robert Maguire
Modernist architect who designed bold new buildings that still respected their surroundings
ROBERT MAGUIRE, the church architect who has died aged 87, was widely respected as a designer and teacher. His church of St Paul, Bow Common, east London, was commissioned by the Anglican liturgical reformer and anarchist socialist Father Gresham Kirkby, and consecrated in 1960. It was Maguire’s first big work in association with Keith Murray, a silversmith by training, who shared with Maguire a passion for the renewal of religious architecture in the 1950s. “What will Christian worship be like in the year 2000,” they asked, “and how can we build a church to reflect this?”
Espousing the principles both of New Brutalism and the Liturgical Movement, St Paul’s revealed new potential in church design. The architectural writer Ian Nairn quoted the words from Genesis imprinted in concrete by Ralph Beyer over the entrance – “Truly this is none other but the house of God. This is the gate of Heaven” – and added: “Indeed it is; and what else is there to say?”
The son of a carpenter living in Paddington, Robert Maguire was born on June 6 1931 into a world of making things. He also had the accidental benefit of attending a local LCC School at which the creative principles of Rudolf Steiner were adopted.
At 16 he began working for the church architect Laurence King, before enrolling at the Architectural Association on a scholarship in 1948. From his friendship there with Jake Nicholson, son of the artists Ben and Winifred, he entered new worlds, travelling in hill country in the North and in Wales.
As Gerald Adler wrote in his 2012 monograph on the partnership of Maguire and Keith Murray, the strands of European Modernism absorbed from the Nicholsons and “a pragmatic British rural romanticism” ran as threads through Maguire’s career.
He learnt a lot about construction technology as technical editor, for four years in the 1950s, of the Architects’ Journal, where he met his first wife Robina, the secretary to the editor, Colin Boyne (for whom he built a house in Kent).
Maguire (a Catholic who moved to the Church of England) and Murray became key members of the New Churches Research Group, a focus for liturgical change, who helped to publish their writings and introduced them to their next major client, Peter Vowles. Vowles commissioned St Matthew, Perry Beeches, Birmingham (1963), a sliced-off hexagon in plan, rising with bands of coloured brick to a tiered roof with angled clerestories.
Other new churches followed: All Saints, Crewe, (1965), four-square like Bow Common, St Joseph the Worker, Northolt (1970), and, in a work of exceptional sensitivity, on a historic monastic site, the enlargement of St Mary’s Abbey of Anglican Benedictine nuns at West Malling in Kent (1962-66).
Bob Maguire did much other work, especially for Oxford colleges, where he had been spotted by Sir Arthur Norrington, the President of Trinity, who commissioned new residential buildings inserted in the historic site (now threatened with demolition), with a large extension to Blackwell’s bookshop running beneath (1959-66).
At a time when flat roofs were the norm for modern architecture, Maguire and Murray were prepared to use the pitched roof and other attributes of the past such as traditional materials and window sizes. This ability to respond to historical context was one of the firm’s strengths. Further schemes followed at Pembroke and Worcester Colleges, and at Canterbury for King’s School.
Also outstanding was the student housing, Stag Hill Court, for the University of Surrey (1970), where in response to mental health problems among students the old paradigm of the corridor-based block was replaced by smaller units with pitched roofs and shared spaces.
The architects’ own experience of living in a communal way with their families in Kew, in a novel Christian scheme called Fabyc (Families by Choice), was brought into play. The Lutheran Centre in Sandwich Street, St Pancras (1974-78), built during a period of rampant inflation, made skilful use of a tight urban site, with respect for its neighbours.
School design became another speciality, with St Luke’s School, Bow Common (1970), commissioned by their earlier patron, Father Kirkby. This was a barnlike structure with a big sloping roof over a variety of open and enclosed spaces that broke with convention and demonstrated the “learning by doing” principles of the 1967 Plowden Report on primary education. Examples at Wickford and in Berlin pursued the same theme.
In 1976 Maguire was appointed head of the architecture school at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University). At a time when many schools were dug into a reductive kind of Modernism, his innovations included group working and no marks in the first year, and the development of specialisms in urban design and global vernacular.
Architecture for People (1979), edited by his colleague Byron Mikellides, with an essay by Maguire on West Malling, included contributions from many of the significant figures in this movement, such as the part-time design staff at the polytechnic Peter Aldington and John Craig, with whom Maguire was grouped as “Romantic Pragmatists” in an article in the Architectural Review in 1983.
The authors Peter Davey and Gillian Darley explained that the description meant “informed by tradition but not eclectic … gentle but not weak”. Maguire’s contribution is all too easily overlooked when the 1970s is seen only in terms of High Tech and flashy Post-modernism.
Maguire was overstretched trying to combine academia and practice. He moved to Oxfordshire and later set up a second office in Thame, but the division led to a split with Keith Murray, who continued to work independently, and the new practice, Maguire & Co, came into being in 1988.
Robert Maguire was married twice, to Robina, with whom he had four daughters, and then to Alison, with whom he moved in retirement to live near Selkirk, bringing her two sons into the family.
Robert Maguire, born June 6 1931, died February 8 2019