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Trevor Dannatt’s designs included homes, university campuses and public spaces.
Trevor Dannatt’s designs included homes, university campuses and public spaces. Photograph: Paddy Walker
Trevor Dannatt’s designs included homes, university campuses and public spaces. Photograph: Paddy Walker

Trevor Dannatt obituary

This article is more than 3 years old
Architect renowned for his work on the Royal Festival Hall

The Royal Festival Hall, London, is an enduring legacy of the cultural optimism of the Festival of Britain, seven decades ago. In 1948, a hand-picked team of architects was brought in by London county council (LCC) to design the concert hall on the South Bank in which the festival would hold its main show. Among them were eight members selected by their former tutor, Peter Moro, at Regent Street Polytechnic, who, along with Leslie Martin, led the project. Trevor Dannatt, the last survivor of the group, has died aged 101.

Dannatt detailed the staircases and glazed screens of the foyers, along with some of the external windows and last-minute furnishings. He explained how each balustrade has a notch running up its centre for one’s thumb; how the main foyer stopped short of the riverfront for a double-height restaurant with its own spiral stair; that the columns on the main floor were lined in timber and how each element has a flash gap, creating a shadow that defined and separated it from the rest.

Trevor Dannatt’s close attention to detail was evident in staircases at the Royal Festival Hall, London. Photograph: Katherine Leedale

The festival over, in 1952 there were few jobs for architects. Dannatt progressed from coffee bars to private houses, including one in Cambridge for the history professor Peter Laslett, whom he met through a mutual friend. Laslett in turn introduced him to Trinity Hall, where he added a senior common room that defines his mature style, its brick and concrete structure exposed and expressed but never brutalised. Dannatt had visited Denmark and Sweden in 1947, but his greatest influence and mentor was Martin, who in 1956 left the LCC for Cambridge University and set up a practice “in association” with two younger architects, Colin St John Wilson and Dannatt – unusually, it was not a formal partnership.

They collaborated on a hall of residence at Leicester University that is a modern interpretation of traditional post and lintel construction with a nod to Martin’s own inspiration, Alvar Aalto. It survives as a conference centre, the main block now called the Dannatt Building, and enabled him to form his own practice.

Dannatt’s best buildings, notably the adult education college that followed in Leicester (1962), teased out complex briefs into long, low forms of surprising elegance. He was most proud of a hall added at Bootham school, York, combining the functions of a lively school theatre with that of a Quaker meeting room. He also designed a Quaker Meeting House in his native Blackheath, south London, although he was brought up in the nearby Congregational church – a building he remodelled after wartime bombing but that is now offices.

In 1966 Dannatt won an invited competition for a hotel and conference centre in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, well before commercial firms worked there extensively. The conference centre repeated the egg-in-the-box plan of the RFH and Bootham School, but within pairs of columns under a white concrete roof. It led to a series of villas, a mosque and to a new British embassy, completed in 1985.

The British Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Photograph: Peter Cook

Other architects might have retired, but Dannatt transformed his career again, to work at two of London’s most historic sites. Following the sudden death of his partner, Colin Dollimore, in 1994 he took on David Johnson, whom he had taught at Manchester University – they were, respectively, 74 and 35. As consultants to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, their largest intervention was another column and beam structure, the fan-shaped structure at Victoria Gate.

Dannatt had begun working for Thames Polytechnic in 1980, reconfiguring its many campuses across south London and north Kent. When it became Greenwich University in 1992, it determined to have a site in the historic town, and Dannatt Johnson Architects first adapted the 18th-century Dreadnought hospital as a library, then converted three of the four main hospital buildings by Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor for teaching, completed in 2001. At a time when neoclassicists might have sought to compete with the buildings’ highly charged baroque, Dannatt Johnson adopted a lean, modest style that allowed the historic features to speak for themselves.

Victoria Gate at Kew Gardens in London. Photograph: Peter Cook

Dannatt also wrote extensively. In 1945 he produced the first of 10 editions of the Architects’ Year Book, initially with Jane Drew, which led in turn to Modern Architecture in Britain, published in 1959. When the listing of postwar buildings began in 1987 it was still the only book on the subject and Dannatt was persuaded to join English Heritage’s steering committee, serving assiduously until its abolition in 2002.

Born in Blackheath to Jane (nee Wood) and George Dannatt, Trevor attended Colfe’s school in Greenwich. His great-grandfather and grandfather had a grocery business in Blackheath, which his father sold on. Trevor’s parents determined that he should be an architect like his uncle, Percy Boothroyd Dannatt, and, once he began his training at Regent Street Polytechnic, he had no regrets. Like his influential older brother, the artist George Dannatt (1915-2009), Trevor built up an exemplary collection of modern British art, most of which he bequeathed to the Whitworth Gallery at the University of Manchester.

The first Royal Academician to live to 100, Dannatt married twice: in 1953 to the artist Joan Howell Davies – the marriage was dissolved in 1991 – and in 1994 to the cancer specialist Ann Crawford. Ann survives him, as do the children from his first marriage, Clare and Adrian.

James Trevor Dannatt, architect, born 15 January 1920; died 16 February 2021

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