The AA is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Julyan Wickham of Wickham van Eyck Architects, AA Diploma 1968, former tutor and former Council member. The following tribute has been written by Brendan Woods:
I was very sad to learn that my old teaching partner at the AA from 1979–81 has died. Julyan was a larger-than-life character and as an Italian ex-student of ours said, “he could burst into a room through an open door.”
Ours was Unit 4 in the AA Intermediate School. The unit trip in our first year was to Glasgow via Leicester to see the Engineering Labs, Gib Torr. We stayed in Ted Cullinan’s barn in Staffordshire and visited Lud’s Church nearby. We also saw Lutyen’s Greywalls outside Edinburgh and then went to the Glasgow School of Art. We situated the site of our main project on the banks of the River Kelvin. We had decided that, given the increasingly heterogeneous nature of AA students in the late 1970s, we should show them a bit more of Britain than Heathrow and London, and so we took them in a caravan of cars to Scotland via fairly remote places.
Our students were from the US, Iran, Italy, South Africa and Canada, as well as various parts of England. And Julyan, in his Teddy Bear coat at the wheel of his Citroën, was in the lead. The students were astonished to encounter wild wallabies near Lud’s Church, and then to discover that Lud’s Church itself, was not a building but a cleft in a sandstone escarpment, and we were subsequently delighted by the hospitality of the students at the Mackintosh School of Architecture.
Julyan and I went on to teach together for another year before I had to give up my job at the AA and go off into the world to make some money. We kept in touch and I subsequently worked with him on a major project near Tower Bridge, originally called Horselydown Square. The project was an accomplished design by Julyan with his wife Tess van Eyck, one of the few pieces of real urbanism to come out of the hectic late 1980s. Julyan is also acknowledged as the designer of an extraordinary range of bars and restaurants in London including Zanzibar, Harvey Nicholls top floor and Kensington Place Brasserie (which closed relatively recently).
The bar in Zanzibar, with its long sinuous plan designed with Tchaik Chassay, created sitting places for two or three people, and through its section established a common eye level for bar staff, drinkers and people sitting at the tables on the raised section on the right-hand side – a very clever idea. The beautiful curving bar in black lacquer with tiny inset mirrors was made by Paul White and demonstrated Julyan’s dedication to producing work of the highest quality and craftsmanship; a characteristic of his work in general which is evidenced in many of the fine architectural projects he went on to achieve in this country and in Holland where he largely spent his later years.
