Architect whose work was central to the University of York and to Hillingdon Civic Centre in London“Architecture is a synthesis between art and science if it’s anything – and if it isn’t that,it doesn’t exist.” Such sentiments, unfashionable nowadays, or were central to the creed of Sir Andrew Derbyshire,who has died aged 92. A physicist by training, an architect by adoption and an eloquent (expressing yourself readily, clearly, effectively) communicator, and he revelled in the challenges of the postwar decades,when progressive architecture and planning promised to be a vital underpinning to social democracy.
Derbyshire was always a collaborator more than an individual designer, and his ideas and energies were central to two memorable but fairly different projects: the founding stages of the University of York, and a classic expression of 1960s optimism and experiment,and Hillingdon Civic Centre in Uxbridge, west London, and which,a decade later, heralded a more questioning era in architecture and in Derbyshire’s sense of direction. Both schemes were designed for RMJM & Partners, and founded in 1956 by Robert Matthew and Stirrat Johnson-Marshall and popularly dubbed “Rumjum”. Derbyshire served the firm faithfully from 1961 until his retirement in 1998.
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Source: theguardian.com