Obituary - Will Alsop, architect whose modernist buildings divided opinion

Died: May 12 2018

WILL Alsop, who has died aged 70, was an architect whose bright and unusual structures divided opinion sharply.

Alsop was a longstanding favourite of the avant-garde and, until the late Zaha Hadid actually had any buildings constructed, probably the best-known British modern architect after Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. His work, playful and downright odd-looking to many, had many critics besides fogeyish traditionalists, and some of his buildings were obvious failures.

Yet his best work had the rare quality of being remarkably popular with the people who actually used or lived alongside it. His best-known building in Britain was probably Peckham Library, in south-east London, for which he won the Stirling Prize, the UK’s most prestigious architectural award, in 2000.

Inspired by an open book, with a protruding first floor cantilevered on stilts (and a jaunty orange disc on top of it, angled like a beret), it drew in three times the number of visitors expected and helped to regenerate what many then thought a deprived and crime-ridden area – it was sited yards from the estate where the 10-year-old Damilola Taylor was stabbed.

Not far away, Alsop designed stylish and extremely effective stations for the Jubilee Line at North Greenwich (1999) and the DLR at Stratford (2007); less successful were the cuboid Ben Pimlott Building at Goldsmith’s College (2005), though it had graceful decorative metalwork, and Palestra (2006), a lumpen, 11-storey, cantilevered steel and glass office building at 197 Blackfriars Road, which houses Transport for London.

Alsop, like other ambitious modernists, was well into his career before he received any major commissions, though his talent had been noted since, at just 23 and still at the Architectural Association’s school, he came second to Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano in the competition for the Pompidou Centre.

He both benefited from and contributed to the change in the British public’s attitude towards modernism from the mid-1990s, despite some highly profile failures.

Ninety per cent (in Alsop’s own estimate) were never built. In 2004, Liverpool city council cancelled “The Fourth Grace”, which resembled an over-upholstered crystal footstool. The same year, his £350 million plans to transform Birmingham New Street station, one of the country’s busiest and ugliest structures, were dropped.

The Public (2008), a £72 million arts centre in West Bromwich that resembled a gigantic black shipping container with blob-shaped windows, went up, only to be damned by Arts Council England (which had stumped up half the money) as “not fit for purpose”. It went into administration in 2013, though it continues to draw many visitors and has been repurposed, housing, amongst other things, a sixth-form college. The architectural historian Gavin Stamp gave it Private Eye’s award as the year’s worst building (Palestra won two years earlier).

William Allen Alsop was born on December 12 1947 in Northampton, one of twins. His father Francis was an accountant who retired when Will was still young. Alsop junior was notoriously incompetent with money, and in adulthood his practices, dogged by buyouts and receiverships, went through several incarnations.

He wanted to be an architect before he knew what they did (neither parent had any interest in the subject). His mother Brenda, who liked rearranging furniture, had taken him to see Peter Behrens’ “New Ways” (1926), the first modernist house constructed in Britain. She thought it ugly, but the woman who lived there gave Will and his sister ice cream. “It was really good ice cream, so maybe that had a certain positive effect.” The six-year-old Alsop designed a house for his mother, with the stipulation that it be built in New Zealand.

Francis Alsop died when Will was 16 and he left school, completing his A-levels at evening classes while working in an architect’s office. He then took a foundation course at Northampton Art School, where he was greatly influenced by the muralist Henry Bird, who had him draw a brick.

He proceeded to the Architectural Association, where he was immediately identified as a talent; after the Pompidou Centre competition and a brief stint working for the pioneering modernists Maxwell Frye and Jane Drew, he spent four years with Cedric Price, who built little but had a towering influence on modernism.

In 1981 Alsop launched his own firm with John Lyall. Their first commission was a swimming pool at Sheringham in Norfolk in 1984, and then a visitor centre at Cardiff Bay (1991), which looked like a disposable cigarette lighter lying on its side, and was intended to last for just five years. It was so popular, however, that it was reassembled twice; and when finally dismantled in 2010, put into storage for future use. It won an RIBA prize that claimed it had “single-handedly put Cardiff on the architectural mark”.

That revealed the limited horizons of the modernists at RIBA and the AA, but Alsop’s buildings proved him a more eclectic figure. As well as obvious influences such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, he admired Soane, Lutyens and Vanburgh, and even had a good word for Prince Charles’s “carbuncle” rant against modernism, the traditionalist Quinlan Terry, and their model village at Poundbury. “It has certain qualities – an element of surprise, and element of disorder – that people respond to.”

Lyall left the firm in 1991 and Jan Störmer took his place. Alsop & Störmer secured a fair amount of work in Germany, including the Hamburg Ferry Terminal (1993), before their first huge international success. The Hôtel du Département des Bouches-du-Rhône (1994), known as “The Big Blue” or “The Whale” by locals, was the most significant building in Marseilles since Le Corbusier’s L’Unite d’habitation. It made Alsop’s name.

He was appointed OBE in 1999 and founded Alsop Architects in 2000, the year he was elected to the Royal Academy and won the Stirling, but still found Britain resistant, compared with the Netherlands, where he built several major projects, and Canada, where he created one of his most significant buildings. The Sharp Centre for Design (2004) at Ontario College of Art, was a giant black-and-white checked slab that levitated above a park.

Alsop spent a good deal of time on bizarre, and unrealised, schemes to regenerate northern English cities: a Tuscan hill village to surround Barnsley and an office block modelled on Marge Simpson’s hairdo for Middlesbrough seemed realistic next to his ambition to flood Bradford. In 2007, after having sold part of his practice to venture capitalists, he lost control of his firm.

A keen painter, who had several exhibitions of his colourful abstract pictures, he announced in 2009 that he was giving up architecture, only to join an existing practice three months later as “Will Alsop at RMJM” – “Sounds a bit like Gordon Ramsey at Claridge’s, doesn’t it?”

He left in 2011 to set up aLL Design, which in later years attracted a good deal of work in China, including a gigantic project in Chongqing, which included an entire cultural quarter, complete with artificial sky.

A long-haired, well-upholstered, rumpled figure, prone to long lunches and an enthusiastic smoker, Alsop was exceptionally good company, endlessly optimistic about the “possibilities for joy” architecture offered.

Typically, when asked to remodel the Ancoats estate in Manchester, his first act was to reinstate the pub. “It’s important to ask people what they would actually like. I’m delighted that Peckham Library is so popular, though it’s not good for the carpets. In Manchester they said they would like to sit down and look at water with a cup of coffee or a beer.”

He married, in 1972, Sheila (née Bean), who survives him, with their two sons and a daughter.

ANDREW MCKIE