Ted Cullinan obituary

Founded on ideas about ecology, sustainability and social responsiveness, the buildings of Ted Cullinan, who has died aged 88, prefigured the intensifying debate around the role of architecture in society.

His best-known project was the Downland Gridshell (2002) for the Weald and Downland Living Museum in West Sussex. It was the first timber building of its kind in the UK, and the method of its construction was unorthodox. A diagonal grid of slender oak laths was first laid flat on a scaffolding framework and then literally bent into shape, inch by inch, to create a three-dimensional structure resembling a giant peanut shell, seductive and zoomorphic.

“I liked making this building as much as designing it,” Cullinan told Jonathan Glancey in a 2007 Guardian interview. “We had brilliant carpenters and other craftsmen and technicians who knew exactly how to bend long stretches of green wood to best effect. They worked like acrobats at times. Making this building was like knitting with great threads of architecture. Today so much of architecture is the end product of computers and extruded construction techniques that this hands-on pleasure is something many contemporary architects rarely or never experience.”

Designed to house the museum’s collection of tools and artefacts, as well as a conservation workshop, the Downland Gridshell brilliantly exploited the strength and suppleness of timber. The ingenuity of its design and fabrication was recognised by its inclusion on the shortlist for the 2002 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Stirling prize, the profession’s highest accolade for an individual building. Ultimately, Cullinan’s pioneering structure lost out to a tilting bridge in Gateshead.

However, Cullinan was always more interested in building than in winning prizes. He and his wife, Rosalind (nee Yeates), whom he married in 1961, hand-built their own house in Camden Mews, London, over three years of weekends in the mid-1960s. He particularly relished exploring the relationship between architecture and landscape and was a doyen of the visitor centre, a nebulous, contemporary typology that mediates between the public and sites of historic interest. Like an attentive bridesmaid, it must not detract from the main event, yet still be capable of expressing its own identity.

At Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, one of the nation’s largest and best-preserved ensembles of monastic ruins, Cullinan’s visitor centre (1992) is both an architectural event in itself and part of a wider narrative, framing views and structuring routes around the site. Based on a simple courtyard plan, the building contrives a sense of enclosure, with hefty, dry-stone walls that recall traditional rural structures, crowned by oversailing roofs, like perky hat brims. Anchored in the landscape, it seems always to have been there.

Cullinan had no obvious signature style, instead preferring to mine a seam of quiet eclecticism, ever alert to the possibilities of site and programme. For the 12th-century St Mary’s church in Barnes, south-west London (1984), which was almost destroyed by fire in 1978, a medieval church interior is exquisitely reimagined in a complex cat’s cradle of structural timber. In the Royal Docks, cylinders of student housing for the University of East London (1999) in sugared-almond hues animate a post-industrial tabula rasa. And at the headquarters of Ready Mixed Concrete near Thorpe Park in Surrey (1990), three existing buildings are united by a new single-storey block iced, like a cake, with a thick layer of manicured greenery. Within this exuberantly surreal roof garden, giant “chess pieces” (in reality, ventilation cowls) confect an ambience of pleasurable dislocation, more Alice in Wonderland than corporate office.

Yet Cullinan, a modernist by training and inclination, was also intensely serious about architecture’s wider social and environmental responsibilities and how they shaped the processes of design and relationships with users. He was also a generous and respected teacher of architecture. His commitment to these principles throughout five decades in practice was recognised with the award of the RIBA royal gold medal in 2008. He was also made a CBE in 1987, a Royal Academician in 1989 and a Royal Designer for Industry in 2010. Described as a “practising architect”, he remarked drily: “I cherish that word. I’m always practising. And one day might even get there.”

Cullinan was born in London. His father, Edward, was a doctor, and his mother, Joy (nee Horder), an accomplished artist. Cullinan had a comfortable, middle-class upbringing, first in Hampstead and then in a house designed by John Nash in Regent’s Park. One of his earliest memories was of being held up to a window in his Hampstead home to watch the sky glowing from the 1936 conflagration of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham.

When war came, Ted was evacuated to Canada, with his mother and three siblings. On his return to the UK, he attended Ampleforth college, the Catholic boarding school in Yorkshire. His architectural education began at Cambridge University, where he obtained a first-class degree. Following diploma studies at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, Cullinan spent time at the University of California, Berkeley, on a George VI memorial fellowship. He returned to London and took up a post with Denys Lasdun, architect of the National Theatre. Cullinan designed the distinctive ziggurat-shaped halls of residence for the University of East Anglia (1958), one of the new postwar universities capturing the pervading impetus of national renewal through an ambitious programme of modern architecture. Another, more personal, early project was a remodelling of the decaying Belle Tout lighthouse (1956) at Beachy Head in East Sussex as a holiday home.

In 1965 he founded Edward Cullinan Architects, combining design work with regular teaching, both in Britain and abroad. During the 1970s he consolidated his reputation through a number of thoughtful public and private housing projects. He was also commissioned to design a series of regional offices for the Italian manufacturer Olivetti, conceived as a generic kit of parts that could be applied to different sites.

By the 80s his practice was attracting a steady stream of commissions and the attention of the Prince of Wales, who lauded Cullinan as a proponent of a more socially engaged “community architecture”, which at the time was seen as a way out of the impasse between the profession and a hostile public.

Navigating his way between the end of hardcore modernism and the emerging postmodern movement, Cullinan was often labelled a “romantic pragmatist”, an epithet coined by Peter Davey, editor of the Architectural Review. Though Cullinan’s buildings had an expressive, tectonic quality that seemed to epitomise a spirit both romantic and pragmatic, he disdained the term, preferring to see his work as reframing modernist precepts for the time. Later, larger-scale projects included university buildings in Cambridge, such as a new library for St John’s College (1993), the Faculty of Divinity (2000) and a Centre for Mathematical Sciences (2003).

In 2011 illness finally obliged Cullinan to scale down his activities, allowing him to devote more time to his smallholding in the Peak District, but he still accepted an invitation from Charles Jencks to design a Maggie’s Centre in Newcastle. The nationwide programme of buildings attached to hospitals provides support for those affected by cancer.

Completed in 2013, Cullinan’s Maggie’s is a modest building that hugs the landscape and catches the sun, cultivating a therapeutic atmosphere of tranquillity and empathy. “It’s basically a very large house,” said Cullinan. “A building where you relax, read, cook, take exercise: all of the elements of uomo universale.” As a paradigm of architecture sensitively calibrated to human need, it seemed a fitting coda to his long career.

He is survived by Rosalind and their children, Emma, Kate and Tom.

• Edward Horder Cullinan, architect, born 17 July 1931; died 11 November 2019