It is with great sadness that the AA has learnt of the passing of architect and former AA tutor David Shalev OBE, who has died at the age of 83. He is remembered here by Su Rogers.
David Shalev was totally dedicated to architecture. He taught it, and with his partner Eldred Evans he practised it and lived it. We taught Intermediate 2 at the AA together from 1974–76, but we were first introduced through my friendship with Eldred, who I met a decade earlier while a graduate student at Yale in the 1960s. Eldred, Richard [Rogers], Norman Foster and myself were the only English students there, having received scholarships. Our friend Jim Stirling was also teaching at Yale, and we would all spend weekends together in New York. Eldred was fantastic at Yale. She was the outrageous English girl.
Back in London I had a different kind of friendship with David. He was a rigorous man. You first have to know that the AA’s chairman Alvin Boyarsky was very good at unit ‘marriages’. I started teaching at the AA in 1971 when I needed some extra money. Alvin set me up with Elia Zenghelis and then with Rick Mather. When Rick became too busy to teach, Alvin asked if I would teach with David. Working together wasn’t our choice, but it ended up being an incredibly successful partnership.
Our unit was different to a lot of what was then happening at the AA. On the one hand you had Mark Fisher, whose projects dealt with entertainment and inflatables, David Greene, who was a member of Archigram, and other units dealing with lightweight structures. On the other hand, you had few units that were actually teaching how to design a building. David and I were interested in doing just that. So if there were students – like David Chipperfield, Alex Lifschutz, the late Michael Baumgarten and Kathryn Findlay – who wanted to understand how to design a building, it was easy to attract the good ones. We had 50 students applying for about 20 places, so we could pick who we wanted.
To make a good unit you had to have good briefs, you had to have a good programme, and you had to know what you wanted out of that programme – because students are pretty naïve at that stage in their lives, and they need to be helped along the way. You also had to accept that the only way to get good work out of students was to be disciplined enough as a tutor. And so David and I spent a lot of our summer holidays researching what we wanted to teach. In our first year of teaching together we chose to concentrate on educational buildings, where the briefs became more complicated as the year progressed, which allowed students to learn from and develop a set of rules. The idea of the school – especially the school without walls – was fashionable, and so we began with a brief for a nursery, which progressed into a brief for a primary school and culminated in an ever-more complex secondary school.
It was challenging, but it created a continuous learning curve. This applied to not only the students, but also to us as tutors, and especially to me. I learned a lot from David. He was fantastic with the students. As David Chipperfield has said he always had a pencil in his hand, and he had such a straight way of teaching. When he spoke in tutorials or crits it was clear that he was simply interested in the students’ ability to learn through the plan and the section. He wanted to know if they understood whether the elements that make up a building were working – whether the structure was working, the plan was working, the section, the elevation. This clarity was expressed through his and Eldred’s own architectural projects.
I wasn’t aware of it then, but what we ended up doing was practising a kind of discipline. Mark Fisher would affably joke about the focus of our unit. He would say to his students, ‘Let’s go see what Mrs Clean is up to.’ It’s true that we weren’t partaking in certain aspects of ‘flower power’. (We were, however, great at unit trips – we went to Paris, Barcelona, took tours of English architecture, hosted summer picnics and visited schools all around the UK, from the eco-friendly Constantine Primary School in Cornwall to Prior Western, a state primary school at the Barbican known for its open-wall design.) But there were other kinds of implicit ‘straightness’ to the unit, in that we taught both the value of looking at buildings and the value of architectural history. We also recognised that we had some bright students, and we minded what they were going to do professionally.
David was full of integrity. He would never do something for his own benefit, or something he didn’t believe in. Of course Eldred is all of those things too, and so they made an incredibly good pair. David was a warm and generous person, a brilliant tutor and his criticism was always constructive. He wanted students to understand the process of design, and it was because of his leadership that we had such talented people joining the unit. His legacy will remain through the work of those students.
– Su Rogers