Will Alsop
Visionary and mischievous architect who delighted in colour, pods and stilts set at crazy angles
WILL ALSOP, who has died aged 70, was a maverick among British architects, famous for his bold creations on spindly stilts, his Stirling Prize-winning Peckham Library in south London – a pastel green building with load-bearing legs splayed out like a giant insect – being a prime example.
Alsop’s mischievous creativity could not be further from the Hightech aesthetic of architects such as Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. Instead of their muted palette of white, grey, terracotta, glass and steel, his exuberant designs abounded with colour, playful bulbous pods and pilotis set at crazy angles.
Indeed his work often seemed more like that of an artist than an architect, with echoes of the ideals of the late Sixties and early Seventies – of Pop Art, the Archigram movement and the graphics of Monty Python. “Form swallows function”, he liked to say.
Buildings such as the futuristic North Greenwich Underground station, Urban Splash’s Chips in Manchester, the Blizard Building (a medical research facility for Queen Mary College, University of London), and the Sharp Centre in Toronto, one of a number of Canadian projects, were both fun and functional.
Alsop, then in partnership with John Lyall, had won his first foreign commission in 1990, beating Norman Foster in the competition for the Hôtel du Département (the seat of regional government) in Marseille. Nicknamed “the Big Blue”, it was completed in 1994.
The partnership with Lyall was dissolved in 1991, but a new partnership with Hamburg-based Jan Stormer led to another major European project, for a new ferry terminal in Hamburg. In 2001 Alsop went solo, establishing Alsop Architects.
After a two-year stint as a director of the big commercial practice RMJM – a marriage that was never likely to flourish – Alsop broke free in 2011 to found ALL Design, based in a canalside studio in Hackney. At the time of his death he was actively involved with a series of projects in China, where his lively imagination appealed to the new breed of nouveaux riches developers.
A rumpled, rather portly chain smoker with long, lank hair, Alsop looked the antithesis of the sleek Armani-clad “starchitect” in oversized spectacles. It was the artist in Alsop that set him apart from most of his fellow practitioners. He did not accept there was one, inevitable, way to build that could be deduced by the application of structural logic, and he was willing to acknowledge the importance of that nebulous concept, beauty, explaining that “you can’t create beauty but you know when it’s beginning to work, you know when it’s right”.
Some saw Alsop’s architecture as a reaction to the rationalist tendency of the High-tech school, though his approach had remained the same as it was when he was a student at the Architectural Association in 1970, when High-tech was in its infancy.
If Foster and Rogers appeal to a pragmatic streak in the British approach to architecture, then Alsop appealed to the romantic tradition, where the imagination is allowed to wander.
Alsop’s series of “visioning studies”, done for post-industrial northern cities that were looking for headline-catching projects, might have seemed whimsical. He proposed turning Barnsley into a walled Tuscan hill town, setting central Bradford on a huge lake, and adorning Middlesbrough with a shimmering hotel in the shape of a champagne bottle and an office block modelled on Marge Simpson’s hairdo.
Only the Bradford scheme was realised, albeit on a reduced scale, yet these projects have served to inspire radical thinking about the future of northern towns and cities.
Alsop suffered a major setback when, in 1993, his futuristic scheme for Wales’s National Literacy Centre in Swansea was dropped at the last minute after opposition from local councillors.
A worse blow came in 2004 when, much to Alsop’s dismay, Liverpool city council cancelled his proposed “Fourth Grace”, an astonishing structure, aptly described as “a diamond knuckle-duster”, which had been commissioned to stand at the pierhead alongside the Liver, Cunard and Port of Liverpool buildings as the centrepiece of Liverpool’s year as Europe’s capital of culture in 2008.
The escalating costs of the scheme (from £228m to £324m) and “fundamental changes” to the original plan, the council decided, had made it unworkable. The cancellation of this project was followed by the closure of Alsop’s practice after it went into receivership.
Alsop always put aesthetic ambition before profit and as a result his career was marked by a series of reverses, most notably the high-profile failure of the Public, a £72m arts centre in West Bromwich from which he was removed in 2004, 17 months after construction had begun.
In a damning report in 2011, Arts Council England concluded that it had “agreed to fund a building that was not fit for purpose”. The Public went into administration a year after opening and closed in 2013, to be converted into a sixth-form college.
Alsop’s ideas provoked strong reactions – both for and against.
His ideas for Barnsley prompted
Ian Mcmillan – poet-in-residence at Barnsley FC during their days in the Premiership – to pen 24 lines of verse entitled “Barnsley is a Tuscan Hill Village”, in which he apologised for not having noticed the town’s Italianate charms before, blaming his flat cap and whippet for distracting him from the view. Yet with such fantastical flights of fancy, Alsop showed triumphantly that architecture could be fun. “Making polite, inoffensive buildings is, in my opinion, offensive,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2007.
William Allen Alsop was born on December 12 1947 in Northampton, the son of a retired accountant who was 64 when his son was born. Neither of his parents was interested in architecture; none the less he always wanted to be an architect. When he was six he designed a house for his mother to live in – its most striking specification being that it should be built in New Zealand.
When Alsop was 16 his father died, so he decided to leave school and do his A-levels at evening classes while working for a local architect. He did a foundation course at Northampton Art School and then studied at the Architectural Association (AA), where he entered the competition to design the Pompidou Centre in Paris and was runner-up to Richard Rogers.
From 1971 the school was run by Alvin Boyarsky, a charismatic teacher who nurtured the careers of Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and others who were to dominate the architectural scene. It was at the AA that Alsop met his future partner, John Lyall.
But graduation was followed by jobs firstly (part-time) in the office of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, followed by three years with Cedric Price, who became a lasting influence. Alsop’s first completed building was a swimming pool, unveiled in 1988, in the Norfolk town of Sheringham, where he had a much-loved holiday home.
Alsop was appointed OBE in 1999 and elected to the Royal Academy in 2000, the year in which his Peckham Library won the Riba Stirling Prize.
A habitué of the Chelsea Arts Club, Alsop was a lover of fine wine and good food. He was a keen painter who would take a month off every summer to paint in Majorca with his friend Bruce Mclean.
When it came to his own homes – a garden flat in a Kensington mansion block and his converted stable block in Norfolk – Alsop admitted that he deferred to his wife Sheila (née Bean) whom he met when he was an architecture student and she was a secretary, and married in 1972. “She likes the whole cosy thing, and I like her taste and style,” he explained.
She survives him with their two sons and a daughter.
Will Alsop, born December 12 1947, died May 12 2018