William Gray Ord was born in Durham, UK, in 1923. He gained a BArch degree at Durham University in the early 1950s, completing his RIBA Part 3 qualification in 1953. Following graduation, Ord worked as an architect for Durham County Council. He then took up a position with the Public Works Department for Eastern Nigeria, leaving Liverpool by boat, for Lagos, in November 1959. It appears that he was promoted to become a Chief Architect, within the PWD, at some stage, but details are not clear. By the mid-1960s, however, he was teaching within the Architecture department at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He is recorded in 1970 as having returned to the UK and enrolled on the postgraduate programme run by the Architectural Association’s Department of Development and Tropical Studies, in London. He was tutored by Hartmut Schmetzer and duly graduated with a postgraduate Certificate in the summer of 1971. Precise details of Ord’s subsequent career are not yet known to us but he appears also to have been appointed as a Chief Architect for the PWD in Libya, and is recorded as living in Benghazi in 1978. In later years he is also noted as a professor of Architecture at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang. He passed away in 2008.

Sources

• Architectural Association Student Register, 1970-71. AA Archives
• Architectural Association Diploma Roll, 1969-71. AA Archives
• General Register Office; United Kingdom; Reference: Volume 10a, Page 771
• The National Archives; Kew, Surrey, England; BT27 Board of Trade: Commercial and Statistical Department and Successors: Outwards Passenger Lists; Reference Number: Series BT27-
• Greypower Deceased Data; Compiled By Wilmington Millennium; West Yorkshire, England; England and Wales Death Indexes
• The Architects Journal, 30th August, 1976, p368
• The Kalendar of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1965, p176.
• Awotona, A. ‘The role of the Architect in Developing Countries.’ Mimar: No. 42, 1 March 1992, pp16-16
• West Africa, Nos. 2202–2221, 1959, p869.