It is with great regret and deep sadness that we announce the death of our dear colleague and treasured friend Hugo Hinsley. With an AA career lasting 45 years, Hugo truly was at the heart and soul of all that we hold dear as a School Community.
Hugo's funeral will take place at the Golders Green Crematorium, 62 Hoop Land, London NW11 7NL on Friday 1st June at 2pm. This will be followed by a celebration of his life at the Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES from 5pm. You are very welcome to join.
No flowers, please; instead a donation to Marie Curie would be greatly appreciated. Their care for Hugo in the last days of his life was wonderful and we are very grateful. https://www.justgiving.com/HugoHinsley
The following obituary was prepared by the Housing and Urbanism Programme in collaboration with family, colleagues and friends.
Hugo Hinsley helped to shape architectural education at the AA and abroad for over 40 years. Always keen to broaden the scope of architectural discussion and learning, and to ask how architects might work in fresh ways to better envision and serve their purposes, he was nevertheless equally keen to ground the field in the palpable needs of urban communities. He was an indefatigable urban explorer, always curious how the city had been made, and his walks with students were famous for answering this question with equal balance given to politics, construction, and the cultural habits of residents, each of which may have lent something to the genesis of the place. But this was never to be confused with the narrow focus of the local historian. Instead, Hugo was a passionate internationalist, and his understanding of what was “taking place” in cities was informed by a rich conversation with architects and activists from around the world and a thirst for information regarding global political and urban transformations. He always saw the big picture in the detail.
Hugo was born in Cambridge in 1950, and his account of his upbringing in his academic parents’ home was one in which there was a regular rotation of visiting scholars and academics, infusing the domestic scene with discussions of science, culture, and the politics of international affairs. Not surprisingly, when Hugo studied architecture at Cambridge between 1968 and 1972, he found the curriculum somewhat too narrow and lacking attention to the key challenges of the period. He persuaded his director of studies to allow him to write his own brief for his final year, focusing on the failures of housing policy, the rise of squatting, and emerging housing initiatives.
After completing his degree, Hugo moved to London where he became involved with teaching at the AA. He was recruited in 1974 by John Turner, along with Tom Woolley and Hans Harms, to run a new programme on housing and community architecture. While housing was at the heart of urban social concerns at the time, Turner had been instrumental in reframing the topic in a way that highlighted the social process underpinning it. This theme was extended by Hugo and his colleagues in the new AA programme, emphasising the broadest range of community facilities that support residential life, and they initiated a Community Seminar that attracted broad participation from architects, planners, and community activists around London. Hugo was always proud of the tradition of the AA that enabled architectural education to be engaged beyond simply serving professional practice, and he was an enthusiastic defender of this tradition. When he later ran the 5th Year programme in Professional Practice at the AA, he brought in an inspiring range of practitioners who had turned their architectural education into novel forms of engagement in the wider urban world. Innovatively, Hugo partnered students with these leaders to better understand their work through direct experience, rather than simply replicating the usual lecture format. Hugo always sought to enable students to learn through direct experience of engagement with a problem that demanded an openness and integrity of thought.
The Community Seminar that Hugo began with Tom Woolley in 1974 led to the formation in 1976 of a loose collective of professional practitioners called Support, which focused largely on community architecture. The Winchester Project in Swiss Cottage and Kingsley Hall in Bow are just two of the many projects on which they worked, and which today still stand as exemplary community service institutions. Hugo also worked on the Coin Street project in London’s South Bank area, supporting its alternative approach toward inclusive, socially progressive redevelopment of central city sites. The combination of direct involvement in community architecture and the establishment of an academic platform for reflection on urban issues turned the Housing programme in the AA Graduate School into a scene of international debate, drawing in not only graduate but diploma students, as well, along with visiting scholars and activists from abroad.
Through these seminars, Hugo met Col James, who in 1982, invited Hugo to spend part of the year on the faculty of the University of Sydney. Here, Hugo met a number of like-minded scholars, architects, and housing activists who shared his interest in social justice through housing, and he became closely involved in the housing rights of aboriginal communities in Australia’s central cities. The contacts Hugo made there fuelled his international perspective on this global issue, and this was a perspective that continued to inspire what had now become the Housing and Urbanism Programme in the AA Graduate School, which Hugo co-directed with Jorge Fiori. A central plank of the Programme over the years has been the direct engagement with city governments, their local communities and local universities, through a short, intensive workshop as part of each year’s educational calendar. In the mid-1990s, Hugo was also asked to revive and run what was called the Visiting Teachers Programme at the AA – a one-month seminar bringing teachers from around the world to learn about the school’s ethos and practice, to share experiences, and discuss educational schemes. Hugo was keen to reject narrow manifestos of architectural theory or practice. Instead, he was always interested to diversify understandings, to innovate, and to support the widest gene pool of architectural work.
Hugo was a man of great generosity toward his friends and colleagues. He always preferred to support and encourage rather than take the limelight. He was more interested in being part of successful collective endeavour than in personal recognition, and absolutely detested the syndrome that had given rise to the culture of star architecture. And yet, Hugo was also a man of great concentration, talent, and personal commitment to his work and his hobbies. He had a deep knowledge of construction techniques, both historical and contemporary, urban policies, housing schemes, and much more that defined our field of architectural urbanism. He possessed a similarly cultivated knowledge of ceramics and had pursued pottery as a hobby. In his younger years he owned and maintained a collection of classic motorcycles. One sees a pattern here: he was always most interested in those things in which one may be fully engaged, mind and body, and so always seemed to have the richest possible insights to share with his students and friends. We will always miss this man who enlivened our seminars and classrooms, our city walks, our H&U barbeques, our discussions at the AA bar, and much, much more.
