Jeremy was born in the UK, the son of two architects (his father Peter was an RIBA vice-president for education). Educated at Westminster School and the Bartlett School of Architecture (where mentors included Adrian Forty and David Dunster), his main interest was in architectural history, which resulted in a series of books, teaching roles at South Bank University and the Bartlett, and a life in architectural media where he contributed to Building Design, the Architects’ Journal, the Architectural Review, Architectural Design, learned journals and national titles including the Sunday Times.

Always split across different areas, he was senior lecturer in architectural history at South Bank University from 1990 to 2007, while undertaking various other roles and activities. His fellow-academics included Peter Blundell Jones and Katharine Shonfield (both RIP).

After a short spell as director of the Architecture Foundation (1996-97), where he curated nine exhibitions in six months, including Cedric Price’s final exhibition, ‘Magnet’, while stabilising the foundation’s relationship with government, landlord and programme funders, he later become programme consultant to the expanding architecture programme at the Royal Academy, from 2000 to 2014, working with Richard MacCormac, MaryAnne Stevens, Kate Goodwin and Owen Hopkins.

This was a very creative part of his life. Having become a member of the RA Architecture Committee, he put huge efforts into the exhibition programme, the annual lecture, and the blockbuster Richard Rogers show in the Burlington Gardens galleries in 2013, the biggest architectural exhibition for a decade.

During this period, Jeremy also joined WAF as a contributor, in time to participate in the first edition of the Festival, which took place in Barcelona in the autumn of 2008, where he curated a small exhibition about tall buildings. His role as WAF Curator expanded as the event grew, and he played an important role as a shortlisting and special prize judge, as a chair of multiple architectural luminaries speaking at the event, and as part of the organizing group responsible for recruitment of judges and speakers.

He took a special interest in the launch of the WAFX Awards in 2017, celebrating our tenth anniversary with a set of awards for future projects addressing the major challenges facing the world and showing how architectural thinking could contribute to finding solutions to issues including ageing and health, or carbon, climate and energy.

This initiative was echoed in a programme he ran with the Bartlett and the Slade at UCL from 2016. ‘Thinkspace’ addressed cultural, sociological and science-based issues affecting thinking about the built environment.

Jeremy’s multiple interests were a great strength, in the sense that he always had projects and work in one of his operational areas: media, academe, curation, books. The range and quality of those activities was impressive.

In respect of books, his most significant publication was probably FRS Yorke and the Evolution of English Modernism (Wiley 2003), a pioneering study of English modernism through one of its leading advocates, written with David Allford, a partner of Yorke’s at YRM. But there were a range of other interesting publications: Dream the Impossible to Build the Extraordinary, was co-authored with Frosso Pimenides and covered her 30 years of running the first year of an architecture school (Bartlett 2021). - Isms: Understanding Architecture, (A&C Black, second edition in 2018, first edition 2005), a handbook explaining architectural movements for the public resulted in 300,000 sales and was translated into 14 languages.

A labour of love was the publication of a supplement to the Architectural Review (2016) covering the 175-year history of the Barlett school, which Jeremy edited – few people could have undertaken such a task so successfully within a very limited time-frame.

In respect of his journalism, he could successfully write about buildings, books, cultural history, politics both national and international – and make relevant connections which would put architecture into a broad context. Two publications produced with the Californian architect John Marx, and distributed at WAF dealt with architecture as idea, emotion and technology. At the time of his death, he was working on two books: with Jo Noero on his extraordinary body of work in South Africa addressing post-Apartheid challenges; and with Mario Cucinella on his propositions about architecture, time and history, as well as the aesthetic challenges of producing contemporary chapels or hospitals.

International activities were also part of Melvin-world. In 2004 he was made a Knight of the Order of the Lion of Finland (First Class), awarded by the President of Finland, for his contribution to the restoration of Alvar Aalto’s Viipuri Library, Viborg, Russia (2000 to 2014). He established a UK trust, chaired by Norman Foster, to assist the funding of the project.

Even in his personal life, he found outlets for his interest in architecture. As a client, he commissioned domestic work from Allford Hall Monaghan Morris on his flat in Lambeth (1992), the practice’s first commission, from John Winter for a domestic refurbishment of a modernist home (2003-4); and Mikael Bergquist for a vacation home in Sweden (2007-11).

As a quasi-client, he was responsible from 2004 to 2018 for substantial multi-million-pound construction and conservation activities in respect of Highpoint I and II, the 1930s listed masterpiece by Berthold Lubetkin, and his family home with Lisa and their twin children, Naemi and Thomas, bringing Highpoint back from the brink of poor maintenance and historic refurbishment failures when it was at risk of being added to Historic England’s ‘buildings at risk’ register.

An eidetic memory, and a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of history, culture and global affairs, as well as history and theory of architecture, were generally on display at lunch, dinner, parties and anything in between. Some found this forbidding, even his friends felt obliged to send out a signal if the conversation had turned into a lecture! Some have noted that he ‘didn’t suffer fools gladly’, but one would have to set against that an observation by Katherine Shonfield about how respectful he was, and how un-patronising, to his South Bank students, many of whom were not well educated, or fluent in English. She told me how kind he was to them.

As a lunch companion on a weekly basis for 40 years, all I can say is that it was never boring, frequently long-lasting and probably, by today’s standards, a bit excessive . . .

I will of course miss him personally, as will many familiar with his work at home and around the world who have been in touch. One typical message: ‘His generosity and the depth of his thinking left a lasting impression, as I am sure they did on so many across the field and beyond. His influence on how architects understand their own work will be felt for a very long time.’

Jeremy was one of a kind.

Paul Finch