Neave Brown
Modernist architect who rejected tower blocks to pioneer street-based, high-density housing
NEAVE BROWN, the architect, who has died aged 88, was a pioneer of low-rise, highdensity housing, and the only architect to have all of his British buildings listed.
Two months before his death he packed the Hackney Empire in East London, though he was in poor health and frail. About 1,300 predominantly young architects came to hear from the man who had just been awarded the Riba’s Royal Gold Medal. They gave him a standing ovation.
The award came as a result of a reappraisal of his contribution to the architecture of housing and citymaking, against the contemporary back-drop of a housing crisis, an expanding city and the tragedy of the Grenville Tower fire.
He was the antithesis of the star architect. He had completed his last British building nearly 40 years earlier and in 2002 finally put away his drafting pens, transferring his formidable creative energies into painting, dividing his time between London and his studio home in Languedoc-roussillon, effectively stepping away from architecture.
Neave Sinclair Brown was born in Utica, New York, on May 22 1929; with an American mother and an English father, he spent the war at Bronxville high school, New York, returning to attend Marlborough as “the yank”. He won a place at Oxford to read English but turned this down to study at the Architectural Association (1950-56).
He worked for three years at Lyons Israel Ellis and briefly for Middlesex county council, before setting up his own practice with other architects. He also taught in Britain and America.
Brown was not alone in rejecting tower-blocks as a model for the future, but few did more to develop an alternative model and do so with such a high level of architectural ambition and skill.
His was a street-based architecture – low, ground-hugging and dense – that owed as much to his admiration for the Georgian terraces of London as it did to a more apparent inspiration – Le Corbusier. In 1987 Brown would be both designer and co-curator of the retrospective of the Swiss architect’s work held at the Hayward gallery.
In 1965 he completed a terrace of five houses at Winscombe Street in Camden. Designed to meet the demanding Parker Morris space standards, the ingenuity of the design created interior spaces that afforded both spaciousness and flexibility.
Although thoroughly modern, the terrace fitted the London street pattern, with clearly identifiable front doors and a shared garden behind. It encouraged sociability, a place where neighbours could and would drop by. It was at Winscombe Street that Brown, and his wife Janet, brought up their children Victoria, Aaron and Zoe, putting his ideas about the “intergenerational home” to the test.
In the same year, Camden council appointed Sydney Cook as its chief architect committed to finding new models of housing. Meeting Brown and visiting Winscombe Street convinced Cook that he had found the architect to design Camden’s future. Brown’s first project for the borough, Fleet Road, comprised 72 flats and a shop, with planted, shared roof terraces and individual balconies and gardens.
Built at the same density as a tower block, it rose from one to four stories. In later years Neave moved from Winscombe Street to Fleet Road – becoming, as he had in Winscombe Street, both resident architect and conscientious neighbour. It was here that he died, surrounded by his family.
Brown’s most famous project, Alexandra Road, near Abbey Road, was not so much a housing scheme as a microcosm of the modern city, incorporating a community centre, two schools, shops, a youth club, and a maintenance depot, as well as 500 terraced homes along a gently curving street. Each flat has its front door to the street and a balcony facing south. The street and, parallel to it, a linear park contributed two new and distinctive public spaces to the city.
Built at a time of rocketing inflation (1967-69), the costs spiralled and this, along with the uncompromising modernity of the design, caused controversy. The political changes later brought by Margaret Thatcher, in effect, took housing out of the hands of local authorities and placed it with the national house builders. The future of London became, for a period, suburban in style and density.
The experiment with low-rise high-density housing was stopped short and Brown had to look beyond Britain for work.
It was the public spaces of Alexandra Road, and the integration of complex social facilities with housing, that attracted the aldermen of the Hague to appoint Brown in 1987 to design a project of equivalent complexity and even higher density on the Zwollsestraat, marking the boundary of the city to the sand-dunes and sea.
Designed with David Porter, the project was at an advanced stage, with the building rising from the ground, when the developer-client determined to discard the intricately designed street-based public realm and replace it with deck access to the flats. The architects relinquished the project.
Brown was more successful with a delicate cluster of apartments built outside Bergamo in Italy, and a second Dutch project, the “Medina” (19932002), designed for central Eindhoven in Holland. In 2012 Brown was invited to join the residents to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its completion.
His passion to explore and explain ideas led to visiting professorships in the United States and Germany and motivated him to become an accomplished designer of exhibitions.
The architectural quality of Brown’s British projects was confirmed by their listing as historic monuments (Alexandra Road in 1993, Fleet Road in 2010, and Winscombe Street in 2014). As significant was Brown’s evident rapport with those who lived in the homes he designed. The listing of Alexandra Road as Grade 2* (Buckingham Palace is Grade 1) inspired the documentary film One Below the Queen, made in 2010 by residents about their experiences.
Alexandra Road had been finished just as architects were becoming “post-modern”. However, Brown was not unhappy to be considered an “old-fashioned modernist”, remaining intellectually engaged with the formal language of architecture and its relevance to an inclusive society.
The reappraisal of his work comes at a time when London’s population is rapidly growing, there is a housing shortage and London’s skyline is under threat. New models are being sought for raising density but maintaining the scale of the city.
Neave Brown is survived by his wife Janet and their children.
Neave Brown, born May 22 1929, died January 9 2018