It is with great sorrow that we announce the passing of Julian Sofaer, “a highly principled modernist”, who contributed to the reconstruction of post-war London.

Julian Sofaer belongs to the generation of architects who began their career in London at the end of World War II.

A great lover of art and the Italian Renaissance, Sofaer was a designer obsessed with form and harmony. He disliked Le Corbusier’s use of concrete in the fabric of buildings, maintaining that it had been imposed arbitrarily on the English scene. Brutalism, no matter how pure, was alien to him; and to Sofaer technical tour-de-force, no matter how brilliant, was not enough. He delighted in the work of Alvar Aalto whose buildings, he thought, stemmed from essentially humanist thinking and were beautiful and life-enhancing. But he was a very independent-minded person who refused adopted formulas and never joined fashionable movements in architecture or elsewhere.

Highly musical, he liked to say that “a building is like a musical instrument. It must be played by a musical person.” His friend, the art historian Ernst Gombrich, also passionately musical, helped him to articulate the links between music and architecture through an exploration of classical proportion that led to the ‘Golden Section’, which he compared to ‘a harmonic chord’.

Sofaer worked very much on his own, never employing more than five assistants and was never tempted to expand his office to take on work for which he could not personally be in charge.

Sofaer was born in 1924 into Baghdad’s ancient, and at that time influential, Jewish community. His maternal grandfather was a member of parliament, who represented Iraq at the League of Nations when it gained independence. Following the failure of the German-inspired revolt against British rule in 1941, Arabs and local Bedouin tribes launched a vicious pogrom against the Jewish community, then perceived to be pro-British, and murdered many of them. Sofaer and his sister narrowly escaped death. With their home and belongings lost, their widowed mother fled with them to India (her older son was studying medicine in London). Life in India, though not easy, was at least free from the fear of persecution and violent death.

In Bombay, Sofaer first attended a Jesuit school and then entered the Architecture Department of the School of Art. His ambition was to become a violinist and so he continued to study music alongside his architecture course.

In 1945 he successfully applied for admission to the Architectural Association. Sofaer admired England since the day when as a young boy walking down the street with his mother, a British soldier bumped into her and said “I beg your pardon, madam”, a courtesy that struck him as unusual and highly civilized. At that moment, he decided that he would one day come to London.

In London his expectations were met musically and culturally. At the Albert Hall, he could attend concerts by the greatest violinists of the time: Heifetz, Huberman, Menuhin, Ida Haendel. Music, he said, put him “in touch with upper spheres where life was beautiful’ and was an escape from post-war London with its gloom, its ruins and its rationing.

After receiving his AA Diploma in 1948, Sofaer worked from 1949 to 1955 with Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall, a prominent architectural firm then preparing for the 1951 Festival of Britain. He became the assistant in charge of designing the Susan Lawrence School at Lansbury: its clever planning, decorative details and use of natural light made it an exemplar of post-war schools and it is now a Grade II listed building. The Dick Sheppard School and other projects followed, but Sofaer never found it easy to work in a large firm, so in 1955 left YRM to establish his own practice. Six years of struggle followed before his qualities were recognised and significant commissions started coming in. Many came from the London County Council and the Greater London Council, for whom he built more than sixty schools and colleges as well as over a thousand flats and community facilities. For other clients he built homes for the aged, private houses, and office buildings. His synagogue and old peoples’ home in Wembley were opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1977.

The extension of the West London Synagogue in Seymour Place, with Youth Centre and Library (1961), with its perfect balance of light and void and its attention to detail won a Civic Trust Award for the “contribution it makes to the appearance of the local scene”. The architect Alan Higgs praised its design for its “rationality, simplicity, honesty and clarity” and described Sofaer as “a highly principled modernist”.

In 1965 Sofaer was commissioned to design the Hugh Myddelton Primary School in Islington. That school exemplified Sofaer’s search for harmony in proportion, space and light at a time when schools were still being built of prefabricated components or to a ‘rationalised’ programme that divest them of personality. The school was singled out by Nikolaus Pevsner as “the most interesting…departure from standard types” and Roger Thompson wrote in the Architectural Journal that “Sofaer’s obsessive concern with form and harmony is more conducive of felicity than the tenets of the new brutalism”.

Sofaer’s ‘Meridian West’, a private house on a sloping hillside in Greenwich (1963), was designated a Grade II listed building in 2007.

On 14 November 2013, in the Quadriga Gallery in Wellington Arch, English Heritage celebrated 24 architects who had contributed to the rebuilding of post-war London and had their work listed. Julian Sofaer was proud to have been included as one of them.

Sofaer was a close friend and supporter of the Austrian painter Gerhart Frankl, who fled the Nazis in1938. On his death, in 1965, his widow appointed him trustee of her husband’s paintings, with the freedom to use them as he wished to promote Frankl. Sofaer compiled the Oeuvre Catalogue and, for over 30 years, arranged more than 30 exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery and the Fitzwilliam, as well as in Austria, Italy and Germany.

Ultimately though, Julian Sofaer’s greatest pride and source of joy was his family.

He was always grateful to the town he had made his home and to the country that, in his words, “had saved the world”.

Julian Sofaer, Architect, was born on 10 August 1924 and died on 30 May 2017.

He is survived by his wife, Ada, his daughter, Neema, her husband and their three children.