The other two were Richard Burton and Paul Koralek. Shortly after graduating, they formed what was to become one of the most distinguished British practices of the last four decades of the 20th century, Ahrends Burton & Koralek. Each of the three had an unusual background even by the standards of those drawn to architecture at that time. Peter was going to talk about his personal history at WAF in Berlin in 2016, the city where he was born and on which his family left an important if barely acknowledged mark. Sadly, he was taken ill and telephoned me to explain why he could not make it from the emergency room of a London hospital. Fortunately, he was able to persuade Berlin-based cousins to stand in for him.

Though born in Berlin, he thought he might have been conceived in Moscow, where his parents had moved during the madness of the early Nazi years. Steffen, Peter’s father and then a young architect, was invited to work there with Ernst May, the legendary architect of ‘Das Neue Frankfurt’. Peter’s mother was Margarete Visino. Fortunately they moved back just before the shutters in the Soviet Union came down, but Peter remembered his nursery being decorated with socialist-realist prints intended to form children’s minds.

Steffen, born in 1907, was educated at the University of Berlin-Charlottenberg and Bauhochschule Weimar before working for his father Bruno, also an architect who had a distinguished career in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Bruno was born Bruno Arons, a member of the family who established the very successful bank Gebrueder Arons, but changed his name in 1904 on converting to Christianity and marrying Johanna Springer, granddaughter of the publisher Julius Springer. With the textile tycoon, Kaiserjude and philanthropist James Simon as an uncle (he was funder of the excavations at Amarna that uncovered the famous Nefertiti bust now in Berlin’s Neues Museum), Bruno and his family seemed well established in Berlin high society.

But then came the Nazis. Despite his conversion and, or perhaps because of, his connections, Bruno was forced to shut his practice; Gebrueder Arons was appropriated and handed over to Deutsche Bank, and despite being the biggest single donor to the Berlin national museums, James Simon was temporarily written out of their history, resurrected by the James Simon Gallery extension to the Neues Museum, designed by David Chipperfield. Bruno and Johanna had the resources to travel to Italy, but had the foresight to apply for residency in the UK, which his distinction as an architect granted. Steffen who had yet to make his reputation as an architect, so stood no chance of acquiring British residency. However, in 1938 he was able to take his family to South Africa where the prime minister, J C Smuts, acted as if the Biblical status of Jews as ‘God’s chosen people’ was literal, and allowed significant Jewish immigration.

There were grounds for optimism in South Africa in the 1940s. Its mineral wealth and successful agricultural sector meant it emerged in a strong economic position from World War II, but much of it was underwritten by cheap (black) labour. Already scarred by endemic racism, the situation became worse after the National Party won power in 1948 and brutally implemented and institutionalized apartheid. This was the background against which Steffen managed to establish a successful architectural practice, producing modernist public buildings and eclectic but well considered houses for the white elite, based in Johannesburg, where Peter grew up. Deciding he wanted to study architecture, his father followed the advice of an employee who was an AA graduate, that Peter should go to Bedford Square. He traveled up the east coast of Africa, through the Suez Canal and landed in Europe at Venice, spending a few months in Italy before heading to London and the AA.

Within weeks he became friendly with two fellow new students, Richard Burton and Paul Koralek. They had different but similarly esoteric backgrounds. Burton’s father Basil had served in the Long Range Desert Patrol Group during the war (from which emerged the SAS) and, as a cinema manager, liked to greet his guests in formal evening wear. Basil’s uncles included the press barons Lord Northcliffe and the 1st Lord Rothermere as well as other assorted ennobled members of the Harmsworth family; one of his sisters was Christabel Bielenberg (who lived through Nazi Germany in the circle of plotters against Hitler, as recorded in her book The Past is Myself), and his cousins included Cecil King who ran the publishing empire IPC and controlled the Daily Mirror (itself founded by his uncles), until he was sacked for plotting a coup to overthrow Harold Wilson.

Paul Koralek was born in Vienna, but his textile-trade family had interests in the UK which allowed them to settle there after the Anschluss. Taking lessons from, and formed by these complex backgrounds, they quickly made a formidable trio.

Within weeks, Ahrends began to be aware of his background, which was rarely discussed within his family. One of the AA tutors came up to him and said, ‘Ahrends? I know zis name’. He was Arthur Korn, expert on urbanism, who had been a member with Bruno of Der Ring, an avant garde group of architects in Berlin after World War I. Peter remembered at this period a visit to the South Bank site of the Festival of Britain, and slowly beginning to appreciate the scope of architecture to serve society and represent social ideals.

The trio decided to form a practice on graduating, but struggled to find commissions. Peter worked for Denys Lasdun, Richard for Powell & Moya where he learnt useful lessons about healthcare design. Paul travelled to New York to work for Marcel Breuer and was assigned to the French ski resort Flaine, but managed to find time to enter competitions as his contribution to the practice Peter and Richard were trying to start in London. One of these competition entries, for the Berkeley Library at Trinity College Dublin, won. It is a striking modernist design but sensitive to its historic context, a leitmotif of ABK’s work.

Berkeley Library, Trinity College Dublin (Photo credit: John Donat, Walter Rawlings and Antoine Raffoul)

This initiated a long and fruitful collection with Ireland and Dublin, and inaugurated a succession of distinguished buildings across the UK. They include Chichester Theological College, libraries in Redcar and Maidenhead, a wonderful flowing glazed wall protected by a brick outer wall at Keble College Oxford, and the Cummins engine factory in Lanarkshire, Scotland, for which they were recommended to the client by Kevin Roche, who designed numerous buildings in the US for the company.

Chichester Theological College, Sussex (Photo credit: John Donat and Antoine Raffoul)

Other leitmotifs emerged. Designing libraries introduced them to the virtues of roof lighting, especially on large buildings with complex buildings below. This can be seen not just in TCD and Chichester, but also at Dublin Dental Hospital, St Mary’s Hospital on the Isle of Wight, the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, Plymouth Polytechnic and the John Lewis store at Kingston, south-west London, where the building steps over a main road that cuts through the building on a diagonal.

John Lewis, Kingston-on-Thames (Photo credit: Martin Charles)

Another characteristic of their work was an ability to mix and match building materials and techniques. Though they could use steel inventively and decoratively, as in their stations for the Docklands Light Railway in east London, or the bold diagonal structure of the Cummins factory, they never went for a pure ‘high-tech’, though they could also experiment, as in the Hooke Park campus (now owned by the AA) where working with Frei Otto, they pioneered using bent wood saplings as structural elements. Much of their best work combines traditional with new materials, such as Keble. This fitted with their interest in fitting unashamedly new buildings into historic contexts, which itself expanded, partly through study tours to the middle east, into a fascination for creating intimate spaces along an intriguing route.

Above all their work always placed the experience of users, occupiers and inhabitants at the forefront. This is evident in the ‘cenobitic, but not sybaritic’ bedrooms at the Chichester Theological College, and many of their housing schemes such as that at the new town Basildon. There for the first time they brought in a sociologist to advise on how to design mass housing for large numbers of unknown occupiers, a strategy that also informed the Cummins factory.

ABK became a magnet for talented young architects, some staying there for relatively short periods, contributing to a few projects, learning and moving on, others remained for most of their careers. Much of what made their work such as draw was the fruitful collaboration which the founders were able to achieve, drawing on their diverse backgrounds and experience. This in turn made them reluctant to treat their designs as declarations of absolute certainty. Instead their work was open ended, intriguing and introduced imaginative possibilities for their clients and building users.

With a reputation established by the time they were 30, large plum commissions beckoned. They were considered but not selected for London’s National Theatre and British Library, but were appointed for a large hq for the Post Office, then still in state hands, on its traditional site of St Mary le Grand, just north of St Paul’s. Had that not died in the general loss of confidence and economic strength in the 1970s, it would have brought the quality of work which they were showing in other less visible parts of the country to the capital, and might have given them the status later enjoyed by their contemporaries Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. But it was not to be.

Much worse for their reputation was the unsolicited and largely unjustified attack on their winning proposal for the National Gallery in London by the then Prince Charles, at a gala dinner to celebrate the RIBA’s 150th anniversary at Hampton Court in 1984. The competition, in the early days of Thatcherism, was badly flawed in that the gallery space was to be funded by a commercial development on the site (the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square). Given this condition, the design which was led by Ahrends, was a sensitive and skilful addition to the rather unconvincing neo-classicism of the main gallery, accommodating both the commercial space and new galleries. But its qualities were drowned out by the furore which followed Prince Charles’ speech, describing the design as a ‘monstrous carbuncle’ which declared an open season to vent all the pent-up anger about the failings of modern architecture in general, against which ABK’s work provided a strong counter argument. In its wake they behaved with exemplary dignity.

To some extent on the rebound, Peter accepted the post of Bartlett Professor of Architecture at UCL. The school had suffered from weak leadership since the departure of the technocrat Richard Llewelyn-Davies, who revolutionized its teaching in the early 1960s but despite appointing talented people, failed to identify an appropriate successor. Design teaching, in particular, had suffered.

Informed by a growing interest in urban culture and the uncertainties it engendered, Peter proposed that all design projects throughout the school should be located in designated ‘study areas’, such as the King’s Cross railway goods yards, or the triangle of Southwark between London Bridge/Borough High Street and Westminster Bridge Road. It refocused the school on design and was best exploited by David Dunster, who ran the final-year design programme. Peter has rarely been accorded sufficient credit for what he achieved in a short period, but in changing the atmosphere of the school made it more attractive to his successor, Peter Cook, who took the school to new heights.

Peter Ahrends returned to ABK in 1989, which was beginning to recover from its princely mauling. A number of significant projects followed: various civic centres in Ireland, the Dublin Dental Hospital and perhaps above all, the new British Embassy in Moscow, the culmination of half a century of sometimes fraught negotiation between the British and Soviet governments. Since retiring he took a closer interest in understanding his roots, publishing a set of memoirs, reflections and reminiscences, A3 Threads and Connections, in 2015. (A3 records the three generations-of architects in the Ahrends family). He outlived his former partners, suffered from ill health in his later years, but remained spirited and communicative.