Florian Beigel
Architect and teacher who designed the radical concrete Half Moon Theatre in east London
PROFESSOR FLORIAN BEIGEL, who has died aged 76, was an architect and educator whose influence on British architecture over the past 40 years was unparalleled; his projects ranged from items of furniture to proposals for the reclamation of former industrial landscapes and, on one occasion, the plan of an entire city.
A highly poetic vision of the relationship of buildings to spaces informed all his work. In lectures, for example, he often made reference to the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi’s paintings of pots, vases and jugs, admiring the way their quiet drama lay in the charged spaces between objects.
That concern was vividly embodied by the building that first brought him to international attention. Commissioned in 1979 by a radical East London theatre company, the Half Moon Theatre was the antithesis of the traditional gilded and velvetcurtained performance venue. With its walls of unadorned concrete, the building’s flatfloored principal hall gave the impression of a courtyard that had been roofed over.
Beigel had in mind the Commedia dell’arte tradition of players performing in public spaces and, on the theatre’s completion in 1985, its potential to accommodate informal stagings was tested by productions such as John Mcgrath’s All the Fun of the Fair – a promenade play in which the audience moved between fairground attractions, each satirising an aspect of “Thatcher’s Britain”.
Florian Beigel was born in Konstanz, southern Germany, on October 10 1941 and completed his initial studies in Architecture at the University of Stuttgart. Graduating in 1968, he assisted the architects Günther Behnisch and Frei Otto on the design of the Munich Olympic Stadium’s innovative tensile roof, before moving to Britain to complete his studies at University College, London. He then took a job at Arup Associates, where he collaborated on the design of the IBM plant at Havant.
Assigned to work on a hotel in Oxford – a project they judged creatively unrewarding – Beigel and Frey quit and set up in partnership, soon securing the commission for a gallery for Fischer Fine Art in central London. Their proposal to integrate a large cage stocked with live birds was one idea that their client declined to realise, but the project was a success and Wolfgang Fischer subsequently invited Beigel and Frey to design a summerhouse at Grundlsee in Austria (1978).
Beigel turned to teaching as a means of subsiding his practice, and in 1972 became a tutor at the architecture school of the Polytechnic of North London. He maintained a central role at the institution (now London Metropolitan University) for the next 46 years, helping to set the agenda of a school that became the most progressive training ground for architects in Britain.
After Frey’s return to Austria, Beigel’s principal creative relationship was with the Canadian architect Philip Christou, who became his partner both in life and work. Together, they headed the Architecture Research Unit (ARU), a practice within the Polytechnic of North London school of architecture.
After German reunification, ARU won a series of competitions for large-scale urban plans on former industrial and military sites outside Leipzig and Berlin. The deployment of infrastructure, topographic adjustments and tree planting became the central tools by which ARU set about addressing a challenge that Beigel characterised as “designing the rug, but not necessarily the picnic”. The rug represented the longer-term interventions, the picnic those of shorter lifespan.
These projects drew the attention of Seung H-sang, a leading South Korean architect who had secured the commission for a new business district on the periphery of Seoul, and in 1998 he invited ARU to collaborate on the design of Paju Book City, which today accommodates more than 300 publishing companies.
The major British project of Beigel’s final years was the internal remodelling of the former industrial building in East London that housed his own architecture school. The design bears comparison with that of the Half Moon Theatre in its conjuring of a quasi-urban atmosphere through the conception of individual classrooms as houses around a communal boulevard.
Passionate and on occasions combustible, Beigel was blessed with a keen sense of humour and enormous warmth. He is survived by his partner Philip.
Professor Florian Beigel, born October 10 1941, died August 25 2018