silverguide.site –

Peter Ahrends, who has died aged 93, was a founding partner in 1961 in the architectural firm of Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK), alongside Richard Burton and Paul Koralek. The trio first met as students in 1951, while studying at the Architectural Association in London, and went on to practise together for more than 50 years, remaining lifelong friends.

ABK’s workload extended from Oxford colleges to public libraries, housing, shops and industrial structures. Unusually, all three partners were involved in design. “Architecture should not be a question of whether or not we put Corinthian capitals on our facades,” they asserted. “It is about people and their lives; about making spaces that will have a living, dynamic and significant relationship with the life and activity they will contain.”

Early impetus was provided by a commission for a Bond Street gallery for the art dealer John Kasmin, hailed by Forbes magazine as “London’s swingingest 60s art gallery”, and a competition win for the Berkeley Library at Trinity College Dublin. Completed in 1967, it was described by one critic as “sitting like a mooring stone at the edge of Trinity’s green, its surfaces pale and pitted, its geometry lucid as a theorem”. Made of concrete and Wicklow granite, it was strikingly and starkly modern, designed to stand its ground in the face of neoclassical neighbours. In 2025 it was renamed the Eavan Boland Library after the acclaimed Irish poet.

Other notable buildings for higher education included Chichester Theological College, a punchy brutalist composition in brick and concrete, followed by a business school at Oxford University (which became Templeton College), constructed in seven phases between 1967 and 1990. A serpentine addition to Keble College (1980), also at Oxford, was a deft modern riff on William Butterfield’s polychromatic Victorian original, but ABK’s inventiveness was not confined to academia. There was housing in Basildon, Essex; an arcadian factory for Cummins, the engines manufacturer, in Lanarkshire; and a stylish warehouse complex for Habitat featuring bright green walls (the colour of Terence Conran’s Porsche) and play structures designed by the artist Eduardo Paolozzi.

Operating at a fruitful tangent to mainstream modernism, ABK’s oeuvre could not be typecast by a particular style. Each building was seen as an individual narrative with different and often unpredictable contributions from the three partners, a dynamic described by Paul Finch in the Architects’ Journal in 2002 as “one getting ready to sound the drum”, while another “ponders on the nature of the drum” and the third “wonders whether actually a trumpet may be more appropriate”.

In 1984, the practice was pitched into the spotlight when its extension to the National Gallery in London, won through an open competition two years earlier, was famously dubbed a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend” by the then Prince of Wales at a gala dinner to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba).

At the time, the “carbuncle speech” was seen as an unprecedented broadside and the controversy reverberated around and beyond architectural circles. Though the ABK partners gamely pointed out that a “carbuncle” was also a type of rare gemstone, their scheme was ultimately abandoned and the National Gallery ended up commissioning a lukewarm piece of postmodernism from the American firm of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

ABK soldiered on, but the adverse publicity generated by the prince’s intervention had a palpable impact on the practice’s fortunes. Over time, however, existing clients stayed loyal and work slowly returned. The British embassy in Moscow (1988) was conceived as a series of discrete pavilions housing residential and office accommodation linked by high-level bridges. Subsequent standout projects included the hi-tech St Mary’s hospital on the Isle of Wight, and an experimental timber workshop at Hooke Park in Dorset, designed with the German architect and engineer Frei Otto. Yet for all these accomplishments, speculation still persists as to what ABK might have achieved without the carbuncle speech.

Born in Berlin, the son of Steffen Ahrends and Margarete Visino, Peter Ahrends was a third-generation architect. His grandfather Bruno Arons, who Germanised his Jewish surname to Ahrends, was latterly in the vanguard of European modernism, designing a housing estate at the Weisse Stadt in Berlin’s Reinickendorf district, now a Unesco World Heritage site. Ending up in Britain in 1939, Bruno was interned for a year on the Isle of Man, with assorted German artists and intellectuals including Kurt Schwitters.

Peter’s father, Steffen, was educated at the Weimar Bauhaus, and went on to join a cohort of young architects working in Moscow under Ernst May, Frankfurt’s city architect charged with overseeing Soviet new-town development. Steffen left Nazi Germany in 1937 for South Africa, where he established a successful practice, designing more than 500 houses. Peter wrote eloquently about the intertwined lives and careers of his father and grandfather in the book A3 Threads and Connections (2015).

Growing up in Johannesburg, Ahrends was educated at the King Edward VII school, but, following his parents’ divorce in 1944, was dispatched to boarding school in the coastal town of East London, 600 miles away. Aged 11, he bunked off on a train to Johannesburg without a ticket and remembers being treated “very pleasantly” by the railway police, unlike a young black man who had similarly transgressed. “From that moment onwards there was a sensitivity to the existence of racism and its physical and social dimensions,” he recalled.

After serving apprenticeships as a carpenter and plumber (his father’s idea of sound practical training), Ahrends enrolled at the Architectural Association, revelling in a London energised by the postwar optimism of the Festival of Britain. It was a world away from the apartheid regime, now tightening its grip on South Africa. “I was a boy from the outback; the festival was so confident and fresh,” he recalled. As a student, he was an enthusiast for Le Corbusier and the American modernist Frank Lloyd Wright.

Following graduation, the ABK confrères embarked on a formative roadtrip in a second-hand Land Rover through Europe and Turkey to the historic Persian city of Isfahan. In 1954, Ahrends married Liz Robertson, who had accompanied him on the Isfahan odyssey; they had two daughters, Jacqui and Jane.

Ahrends returned briefly to South Africa but the growth of apartheid repelled him and he became an impassioned campaigner for democracy. Once in London, he met with representatives of the African National Congress (ANC) and exiled South African activists such as Harold Wolpe, Denis Goldberg and Joe Slovo. From 1986 until 1994 he was chair of UK Architects Against Apartheid, which at one stage encompassed around 200 architectural practices, lobbying for cultural and academic boycotts and the de-recognition of the Institute of South African Architects by Riba.

Along with his commitment to practice and activism, Ahrends was extensively engaged in architectural education. He was professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London (1986-89) and a visiting professor at the then Kingston Polytechnic (1984-85). He was also a member of the Design Council (1988-93).

The original ABK came to an end in 2012 when Ahrends and Koralek finally retired. Burton had left the partnership in 2002 because of illness; he died in 2017. In the late 1980s Koralek, who died in 2020, established a successful ABK satellite office in Dublin, which continues to this day. “If our architecture is ‘social’, it’s because it’s about people and the way they really live, not just aesthetics,” observed Ahrends.

Liz died in 2007. Ahrends is survived by Jacqui and Jane, two grandsons and two great-grandchildren, and his partner, Marlene Rolfe.

• Peter Ahrends, architect, born 30 April 1933; died 30 May 2026