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Will Alsop: ‘Architects are the only profession that actually deal in joy and delight.’
Will Alsop: ‘Architects are the only profession that actually deal in joy and delight.’ Photograph: Jonathan Player/REX/Shutterstock
Will Alsop: ‘Architects are the only profession that actually deal in joy and delight.’ Photograph: Jonathan Player/REX/Shutterstock

British architect Will Alsop dies aged 70 after short illness

This article is more than 5 years old

Tributes pour in for ambitious designer of avant garde and modernist buildings including London’s Peckham Library

The British architect Will Alsop has died aged 70, his practice confirmed on Sunday.

He died on Saturday after a short illness, said Marcos Rosello, director of aLL Design, which Alsop set up in 2011.

“Will has inspired generations and impacted many lives through his work. It is a comfort to know that due to the nature of Will’s work and character, he will continue to inspire and bring great joy,” Rosello said.

“He had an exceptional ability to recognise particular strengths in individuals which he would draw out and nurture. His design ethos, essentially to ‘make life better’, is evident in the architecture of his buildings and their surrounding communities. We will miss him greatly.”

Creator of avant garde, modernist, and occasionally controversial architecture, Alsop was best known for designing buildings such as the bright green L-shaped Peckham Library. Designed alongside the German architect Jan Störmer, it won the 2000 Stirling prize, thanks to its double-height reading room and trademark columns.

Other far-fetched proposals included turning Barnsley into a Tuscan hill town and flooding the centre of Bradford with a huge lake.

Amanda Baillieu, founder of the architecture platform Archiboo, tweeted in tribute to Alsop:

Will Alsop dies and so does one of architecture’s biggest characters and talents, never properly appreciated in UK .

— Amanda Baillieu (@amandabaillieu) May 13, 2018

The architect Anthony Powis also tweeted: “Will Alsop has been one of my reference points for ambitious thinking ever since I heard him talk about Barnsley as a Tuscan hill village when I was a young student. It was amazing.”

Born on 12 December 1947 in Northampton, Alsop left school at 16 but completed his A-levels while working for a local architect. He graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London in 1973 and prior to his death he was a professor of architecture at the Vienna University of Technology and Canterbury School of Architecture in Kent.

He opened six different firms over four decades and was responsible for, among many other buildings, creating a gigantic blue regional government building nicknamed “the big blue” in Marseille in 1994, and the North Greenwich tube station in 1998. He was awarded an OBE the following year.

In 2004 Liverpool city council cancelled his proposed Fourth Grace, a glass cloud on stilts which had been described as a “diamond knuckleduster” and, less generously, a “cow pat”.

Alsop, dismissed as a dreamer by some, was eternally optimistic about the potential of architecture. “Architects are the only profession that actually deal in joy and delight,” he had said. “All the others deal in doom and gloom.”

He is survived by his widow, Sheila, and his three children, Oliver, Piers and Nancy.


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