Richard Gilbert Scott
Little-recognised architect who designed striking Sixties churches and the Guildhall Art Gallery
RICHARD GILBERT SCOTT, who has died aged 93, was a member of the architectural dynasty founded by his greatgrandfather Sir George Gilbert Scott, who designed the Albert Memorial and St Pancras station. The Gothic spirit of his father, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, and grandfather, George Gilbert Scott Jnr, was never entirely absent from Scott’s own architecture, but he sought to come to terms with the dominant modernism of post-war British architecture. Scott designed buildings which are hard to categorise and which bemused, and sometimes infuriated, critics. His work, largely ignored by the architectural press and for a long time profoundly unfashionable, is now the subject of reassessment, with several of his buildings listed.
Born in London on December 12 1923, Richard Gilbert Scott was educated at Harrow, then, after the outbreak of war, at Charterhouse (where his father had designed the War Memorial Chapel, completed in 1927). He subsequently enrolled as a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London (then evacuated to Cambridge), but his studies were interrupted by war service and he enlisted with the 1st Airborne Squadron of the Royal Engineers. While clearing minefields in Norway after the end of hostilities in 1945, he met his future wife, Eline Brodin – her father had served with the Norwegian government in exile in London. They were married in Oslo in 1946.
After completing his training at Regent Street Polytechnic, Scott joined his father’s practice. Giles Gilbert Scott’s career had been launched in spectacular fashion when, aged 23 (despite being a Roman Catholic), he won the competition to design the new Anglican cathedral in Liverpool. Churches were just one element in a portfolio of work that included university libraries at Oxford and Cambridge, Battersea and Bankside power stations, and the GPO telephone kiosk. After the Second World War, Sir Giles (he had been knighted in 1924) was commissioned to rebuild the House of Commons and the City of London’s Guildhall, both wrecked by bombs.
Formally established, in due course, as a partner in his father’s practice, Richard Gilbert Scott took over its leadership after his father’s death in 1960. It fell to him to complete Liverpool Cathedral, working as closely as possible to the original plans. When the decision was taken to radically alter the designs, he resigned.
He faithfully completed his father’s last church, Christ the King, Plymouth, effectively a late product of the Gothic Revival, but his own instincts emerged in the two churches he designed for the Catholic Archdiocese of Birmingham – Our Lady Help of Christians at Tile Cross, completed in 1967, and St Thomas More, Sheldon, completed in 1969. These were dramatic modern buildings, using reinforced concrete to frame spaces tailored to the needs of the new liturgy emanating from the Second Vatican Council. Both are now listed buildings.
The forging of Scott’s own distinctive approach to design can be traced most dramatically in his work over more than three decades for the City of London Corporation. In 1934 Giles Scott had been commissioned to draw up plans for the development of the area around Guildhall, to include a public library, art gallery and municipal offices. The project was put on hold with the outbreak of war, but in 1955 a new office wing north of Guildhall was completed – Pevsner dismissed it as “painfully antiquated”.
A decade later, the City approved Richard Gilbert Scott’s proposals for the Guildhall precinct, involving the creation of a large new open space fronting the medieval Guildhall. Surviving Georgian buildings were demolished, to the dismay of some, for the large new west wing, completed in 1975 and incorporating the Guildhall Library. The style of the building had remote echoes of Gothic but, with its expressive use of pre-cast concrete, reflected the influence of contemporary commercial architecture, including the work of Richard Seifert and that of Philip Johnson in the USA.
A smaller building, completed in 1969 on the northern edge of the Guildhall precinct, saw Scott taking on board Sixties Brutalism with real conviction and making virtuoso use of concrete. The final element in Scott’s Guildhall project, the Guildhall Art Gallery, was completed only in 1999, delayed by the discovery of a Roman amphitheatre below the site which had to be excavated and preserved as part of the scheme.
The Royal Fine Art Commission had been strongly critical of the designs and the architectural journals ignored the completed building, but it is a remarkable exercise in an exotic Gothic style, beautifully crafted and forming an appropriate complement, in terms of scale and materials, to the Georgian Gothic façade of the Guildhall.
Scott worked on the project in collaboration with DY Davies Associates, his family practice of Sir Giles Scott, Son & Partner having been finally wound up. In retirement he moved from Sussex to Norfolk, where he painstakingly restored and enlarged a cottage at Burnham Norton – his last built work – and enjoyed playing golf on the nearby course at Brancaster.
A modest, diffident man, Dickie Scott made light of his architectural achievements and was resigned to critical indifference. However, his independence of fashion and emphasis on sound construction and fastidious detailing are likely to ensure an increasingly sympathetic evaluation of his built legacy.
Scott is survived by his wife Eline, by three daughters and a son, who is also an architect.