Obituary

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2000 by Dean Hawkes

LESLIE MARTIN 1908-2000

Leslie Martin, who died in July, just short of his 92nd birthday, was one of the major figures in British architecture in the twentieth century. His work, as both a practitioner and a teacher, spanned and deeply influenced the critical period in which the ideas of international Modernism came to Britain and became established as the basis of both practice and education.

Educated at Manchester University, Martin began his own practice in 1933 and, the following year, was appointed Head of the School of Architecture at Hull. In 1939 he joined the Architects' Department of the LMS Railway, where he established a research and development section to investigate the potential of new technical methods for application in postwar construction. In 1948 he joined the London County Council, as Deputy Architect, becoming Architect in 1953. This was the period of postwar reconstruction and Martin was given special responsibility for the design of the concert hall, the Royal Festival Hall, which was the centrepiece of the redevelopment of London's South Bank as the site of the 1951 Festival of Britain.

In 1956 Martin was elected as the first Professor of Architecture at Cambridge, and until his retirement from the chair in 1972 enjoyed a period in which his practice produced a sequence of buildings of international standing, particularly university buildings at both Cambridge and Oxford, in which his influence upon education was also of world-wide significance. His role in redefining the nature of architectural education at the seminal Oxford Conference in 1958, and later through the example of his work at Cambridge, where the creation of the centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies (which became the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies following his retirement), invested education with a substantial basis in research, thereby legitimizing its place in the academy.

After 1972 Martin continued to practise until his final retirement in the mid-1980s. Among the late buildings the Centre for Contemporary Art for the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon is, perhaps, the most notable.

It is difficult in a short notice to do full justice to such a rich and varied life. The overriding characteristic of Martin's achievement lies in its diversity. But he was also deeply concerned with making connections between architecture and the wider cultural context of his time. In 1937 he collaborated with Ben Nicholson and Naum Gaho in editing Circle: international journal of constructive art. For him architecture was indivisibly linked to the wider enterprise of art. Equally important was the application of the implications of developments in science and technology. The Royal Festival Hall was one of the first major buildings of the twentieth century which actually realized Modernism's s rhetoric on this subject. Perhaps, most of all, he uniquely understood the potential which his time offered to reconstruct the connection between practice and teaching and to show that both could benefit from the development of a coherent approach to research and academic study.