A reflection by Peter Ahrends
It is with great sadness that we announce the death of AA Graduate, former Tutor and Past President Leonard Manasseh, who passed away at the age of 100 on 5 March 2017.
Leonard Manasseh: Architect, Teacher, Friend
In writing this personal appreciation of Leonard's work at the Architectural Association, I go back in time to September 1951 when I first arrived in London to make a late-teens life for myself. Somewhat overwhelmed by the size and spread of the city I was lifted by the density and strength of the South Bank's Festival of Britain: a campus of modern architecture marking and celebrating Labour's visionary post-war achievements. London's fabric still showed residual scars of war, food rationing was still in place and, by comparison with today's level of general affluence, this now seems like another world, but one in which a strong sense of hope for a different social future prevailed.
For me this intense set of initial impressions formed an optimistic prelude to our first year course at the AA directed by Leonard (who'd designed one of the Festival buildings) with his charge of eighteen-year-olds occupying a spacious studio lying above the library, overlooking Bedford Square. But in all of this, what of Leonard?
Two things come to mind. First was Leonard's tangible but quiet passion about the art of architecture. Then, not unrelatedly, there was his relationship with others. For he was 'there' for one, and spoke in a way that suggested that we-are-all-equally-humans. Thoughtful, straight, respectfully confident, and obviously English, the timbre of his voice also spoke about togetherness. Fittingly, these characteristics and his warm presence came through to us, persuasively and tenderly, as our youthful understandings grew.
For the final project of the year we were let loose on the design of a single detached small family house. I had designed a glassy rectangular box whose single-storey length was intersected by a dividing wall; an extended vertical plane that rose above the flat roof. A statement, or what? In the crit that followed I was pleased to find that Leonard was positive about my scheme. But then, pausing awhile, he added: 'But there's an unresolved duality?’ Ever since, in my life's work at ABK, the more theoretical aspect of that question has remained, unanswered...
For the subject of Leonard's Christmas card last year he painted two red flowers, side by side, sending warmth and brightness in the winter's solstice. I enjoyed this painterly move presenting us with a couplet, rhyming in its togetherness.
Peter Ahrends, 22 March 2017
Peter Ahrends (AADipl 1956) was a student of Leonard Manasseh's at the AA, along with Richard Burton (AADipl(Hons) 1956) and Paul Koralek (AADipl 1956), who together founded Ahrends Burton and Koralek (now ABK) in 1961