Business Publications

Pat Nuttgens

Architectural Review, The, May, 2004 by Peter Davey

Patrick Nuttgens was a magician. I was lucky enough to have him as my tutor in my first years as a student. He was always challenging, witty, kind (though never soft on laziness, either mental or physical), full of enthusiasm, thoughtful, enquiring and idealistic.

He lived for ideas, but never forgot the practical, poetic lessons of his childhood among the arts and crafts community in the Chilterns, in which his father was a distinguished stained glass artist. He always believed that good architecture is an essential element in creating decent society; that architects are not just form and space makers, but people who must use imagination to change and improve the ways in which we live. Few of his students could ignore the message.

He was immensely courageous. He caught poliomyelitis at school and, having been a considerable athlete, was crippled for life. After a terrible period of depression (severe at the time when I knew him first, though none of his students realized), he developed multiple sclerosis. But he was never daunted, and continued energetically to argue, illuminate, paint, discuss and write. He was immensely lucky (and clever) to have the help of his wife Biddy, with whom he had fallen in love in the lecture theatres of Edinburgh.

He helped Robert Matthew set up the Department of Architecture at Edinburgh University (where I first met him). He taught us about the amazing complexity of the city, which even in the late 1950s was still, both in social and physical terms, partly medieval and very tough, overlaid by Georgian elegance, and by mimsy late nineteenth-century gentility. He went on to found the Institute for Advanced Architectural Studies at the new University of York, an early and sadly under-resourced organization which was the first to attempt anywhere to make CPD part of architectural professional life.

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From there, he was asked to be director of Leeds Polytechnic. He attempted to make it into a twentieth-century interpretation of the Arts and Crafts ideal of an institution that could generate both pleasure in practical work and in ideas that drive. He did not succeed because of small-minded opposition from councillors and the often absurd student revolts of 1968. He later had an honorary chair at York, and never lost his affection for that city, or for Edinburgh. He became a successful broadcaster, both on television and the wireless. He published many books (several in collaboration with Biddy), mostly intended to make architecture and the ideas behind its creation available to the general public.

He was immensely generous to everyone who met him. I loved him, and he helped to make the better parts of me.