Leonard Manasseh obituary

Leonard Manasseh, one of the last surviving architects of the Festival of Britain, was a highly regarded designer and teacher who played a significant role in the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA), Riba and Royal Academy over many decades. The founder of Leonard Manasseh and Partners, he was the architect of the former Rutherford school in Marylebone, west London, and the Rotork factory in Bath, as well as of a number of distinctive private houses.

Manasseh, who has died aged 100, designed Rutherford school to a conventional plan in 1957, but its bold sculptural forms – in particular its tall pyramid over the assembly hall, balanced by the inverted pyramid of the water tanks – attracted wide professional attention. The building, off Lisson Grove, was (and still is) full of remarkable details: marble walls, a sculpture court, a stained-glass window. The critic Diana Rowntree praised it in the Guardian in July 1960 and it pleased the London county council, too, because it was completed early and under budget.

The success of the school led to the design of Furzedown teachers’ training college in Streatham, south London, a hall of residence at the University of Leicester and housing estates in London and the new towns of Harlow and Basildon.

Manasseh was born in Singapore. His father, Alan, was a partner in the family firm of S Manasseh and Co, Sephardi Jews from Baghdad who had gone to the Far East to trade, first in opium and later in jute. His mother, Esther, was the sister of Joseph Elias, a wealthy Singaporean merchant who provided the financial support for Leonard to acquire an English education and, eventually, to set up in practice. Leonard went to preparatory school in Surrey and then to Cheltenham college, where he was encouraged to develop his abilities as an artist.

Overcoming doubts about his lack of technical skills, he enrolled at the AA in 1935, at first for a foundation year, and continued there until qualifying in 1941. After that he taught at the school, or otherwise featured in its life, almost continuously. It was the AA that provided Manasseh with his friends and professional contacts, and that shaped his career and singularly optimistic attitude to life.

During the second world war Manasseh served in the Fleet Air Arm. In 1946 he took up a job at Hertfordshire county council, and he was later seconded to the new Stevenage Development Corporation. His breakthrough came in 1950 when he won the competition for a luxury restaurant at the 1951 Festival of Britain. He left Stevenage and established Leonard Manasseh and Partners with Ian Baker, whom he knew through the AA. The project was substantially downscaled to become the ’51 Bar, but Hugh Casson and Leslie Martin helped keep the young practice afloat by recommending it for small projects. In 1953 Manasseh set off for Singapore, in partnership with yet another AA friend, James Cubitt, to try to build up a practice there on the strength of his family connections.

Just as these moves were beginning to bear fruit, however, he was obliged to return to Britain to look after his two sons because his wife, the textile designer Karin Williger, had left home. His former student Jeremy Fry, who had idolised him as a teacher, then persuaded his brother David to employ Manasseh as architect for a new office building for Frenchay Engineering in Kingswood, outside Bristol. This building, completed in 1955, and several others of a similar type were widely admired for the way in which they used off-the-peg steel components to achieve a glossy, showcase effect – a Manasseh trope in future years.

When Fry established Rotork, his own engineering works, in Bath, he employed Manasseh to design it. The buildings went up in stages, the most remarkable being the packing area with its triodetic roof and pyramidal roof lights. Shortly afterwards Manasseh and Baker started work on what was to be, in their own estimation, the best of all their buildings: Rutherford school.

That project brought forth plenty of new work, but the Manasseh practice changed in character in 1962 when the planner Elizabeth Chesterton joined as its resident consultant. Manasseh now found himself acting as master planner on a number of sensitive sites, and consequently also as architect for the projects that resulted from them.

The most remarkable of these was the development of the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, where, with Chesterton and Baker, the principal designer of the museum building itself, he created for Lord Montagu of Beaulieu a grand formal layout of parkland and buildings, linked by monorail. The scheme was on a scale that would have been the envy of many an 18th-century landowner. Other landscape schemes included Wellington Country Park in Berkshire and projects for Foster Yeoman, the West Country quarrier.

A major disappointment, in 1974, was the rejection of his scheme for new law courts in Bath, which, although designed for an empty site, was sacrificed to assuage public anger over recent demolitions in the city. In later years the practice (from 1981 known as the Leonard Manasseh Partnership and eventually LMP Architects) specialised in infrastructure and park buildings.

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While Manasseh undoubtedly established the partnership’s style and always had the last word on design, he delegated much of the work of the office to Baker, and increasingly to his associates (later, partners) Geoffrey Scarsbrook and Christopher Press. This enabled him to act as the public face of the partnership with clients, to concentrate on the design of private houses, and to pursue his other interests.

Of these his presidency of the AA in 1964-65 was perhaps the most eventful, for he led the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to merge his old school with Imperial College London. He had hoped a merger would break down barriers between artists and scientists, and specifically between what he called the “art boys” (the creative designers) and the “system boys” (the systems builders) within his profession. Indeed, it could be said that, if his factories appear domesticated, his houses, with their jagged monopitch roofs, have an industrial air. A fine surviving example, Courtyards, was built for the film director Richard Lester at Petersham, Surrey, in 1964-67.

Manasseh was elected a Royal Academician in 1979, and became the first of that ilk to reach the age of 100. He was an enthusiastic and popular committee member of public bodies, and was president of the Royal West of England Academy from 1989 to 1995. An accomplished painter in oils and watercolours, he invariably exhibited his own work, characteristically of moonlit scenes, as well as that of his practice, at Royal Academy summer exhibitions. His students included the three founders of Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (Peter, Richard and Paul respectively), and Sir Michael Hopkins was one of the many talented young architects who worked in his office. All those who did so testified to Manasseh’s generosity of spirit and boundless optimism.

In 1957, after his divorce from Karin, Manasseh married Sarah Delaforce, and they lived with their family at the house Manasseh designed for them in Highgate, north London. Sarah and his oldest son, Alan, and his daughter, Rebecca, predeceased him; he is survived by three sons, Zachary (from his first marriage), and Amos and Phineas (from his second).