Richard Hughes, who studied at the Architectural Association from 1947-53, died on 8 April 2020 at home in London, aged 93 years old. This obituary is written by his granddaughter Rachel Cass.
Born in London in 1926, Richard and his family moved to Palestine and Tanganika (now Tanzania), before settling in Nairobi, Kenya at the outbreak of war. After school in South Africa and training with the Kenya Regiment, he enrolled in 1947 with an ex-serviceman’s grant to study at the AA in London.
"Whether I applied from Nairobi to the AA because it was the best school of architecture in Europe (and the world), or simply because it came first in the alphabetical list, and Dorothy Hughes [an established Kenyan architect] had been there, I have no idea, but I was amazingly fortunate to have applied and then been accepted at the AA. Had I trained anywhere else my life would have been quite different in almost every way. The ideas about one's responsibilities to society, which includes taking part; that only the best was good enough; an open, but thoughtful, acceptance of new ideas; [and] giving the same thought and approach to the design of a town or a tea-spoon: are attitudes that I still try to live by.” (Richard Hughes, 2017)
The contrast between colonial Kenya and smoggy post-War London must have been extraordinary. Richard thrived in the liberal environment of Bedford Square, studying under Gordon Brown, R.F.Jordan, Arthur Korn, Felix Samuely, Fello Atkinson and Ernesto Rogers. He was delighted to take sketches for advice from the great structural engineer Ove Arup who “treated us as if we were real architects with real problems to solve”. He described “working (or playing) on a temporary building site the AA had set up on a bomb-site on Tottenham Court Road, close to our studios. This was valuable experience (as were holiday jobs working on real sites, when one learnt what building foremen thought of architects’ details and in making a young architect realise how heavy and intractable building materials are.” In London’s galleries, Richard discovered a lifelong passion for Modern art; and travelled across France and Italy, visiting the 1948 Venice Biennial
Throughout his time in Europe, however, Richard “kept Africa in mind wherever possible”. After a Year 3 paper on ‘Tropical Building’, he returned home to work for a year in Nairobi and Kampala, and met and married Anne Hill, daughter of Kenyan journalist Mervyn Hill. They came back to London in September 1951, buying a houseboat on the river and spending their wedding money on a set of Georg Jenssen cutlery that has lasted to this day. Richard’s influential final year paper ‘MARAGUA’ (1953) (with fellow Kenyan, engineer Terence Powell) looked at race, politics, economics and society in rural Kenya. Brimming with youthful confidence and Utopian spirit in defiance, it opened “Our intention is to plan an environment for multi-racial living” and went on to propose an approach to town planning that could address some of the gaping inequality and disfunction. Although there were no buildings, the Architectural Association accepted the scheme as a valid thesis, and the project even gained press attention in the UK and East Africa.
Arriving back to Kenya in 1955, to the tail end of the Mau Mau Revolt and an industry steeped in the forms and ideas of colonial nostalgia, Richard proposed the radical concept of the architect as active citizen in service to all his neighbours. In a characteristically controversial 1958 speech to the East Africa Institute of Architects Annual Dinner, Richard enraged the assembled architectural establishment by citing some uncomfortable facts about the costs of rental housing in the city for Europeans, Asians and Africans, and the polarised conditions in which these races lived.
“The old cliché about knowing how the other half lives is nowhere truer than here, where we have three halves anyway… Architects and town planners have a vital role to play in the solution of these complex and always challenging problems, not only those paid by government to do so, but all of us. …making an intuitive leap into the future based on an imaginative and humane understanding of the facts and an ability to visualise the complete object, whether it be a teaspoon or geographical region.”
The modernist, humanist principles Richard had learned at the Association were to become foundations not only of the 275 buildings his Nairobi architectural practice completed in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Sudan and Mauritius between 1957-1986; but also of his personal principles and active engagement in numerous political and social campaigns. Over the next half century, Richard both saw and generated enormous change in East Africa. With a growing practice of young Kenyan and international architects (including the future Chief Architect of Kenya, David Mutiso, and Dean of the University of Nairobi School of Architecture Tom Anyamba), he built universities, hospitals, television stations, schools, churches, government departments, office blocks, private homes, airport terminals: the architecture of modern nation states designed to inspire and empower their inhabitants.
Richard remained evangelical about design throughout his life, not as a luxury but as a powerful and relevant force for improving people’s lives. Not a day passed without him sketching some natty idea on the back of an envelope or admiring an ‘elegant’ solution. He carefully designed each building with the conviction that every citizen deserved the very best design, shaped to their social and cultural needs, and the local environment, in a time when environmentalism was considered antithetical to modernism. In Kilifi church (1960), the congregation are cooled by monsoon breezes rising from the Indian Ocean through slats in the coral rag walls. At Hospital Hill (1958), the first multi-racial school in Kenya, children share colourful geometric worktables angled so that they face each other. ICEA employees look out over Nairobi from their tower block (1981) through dark windows that filter the equatorial sun.
Despite his enthusiasm for the ideas and designs emerging from mid-century Europe and America, Richard looked past the international language of steel and glass in favour of inexpensive local materials and forms. In 1962, the year before Kenya’s independence, he wrote:
“If a local style is to develop it must be genuine, that is to say, it must follow naturally from the problems and characteristics of the country … from the imaginative and honest solving of the many problems of site, climate, users, client’s brief and budget. ... I believe that grossly expensive buildings, even if the money happens to be available, are out of place in a country without enough school buildings, housing or hospitals. In the creation and improvement of our cities one of the most important things is to have the co-operation and enthusiasm of the citizens themselves.’
Richard’s buildings embody a deep respect for and knowledge of their inhabitants and local contexts. At the opening of his retirement exhibition in 1986 in Nairobi, Fiona Fitzgerald concluded that his buildings “they speak not of any ism, but of Kenya”.[1]
Principled and brave, Richard championed causes at the time deeply unfashionable: education, housing, multi-racial politics, environment, Islamic architecture. His indefatigable resolve fuelled some remarkable victories: attending the Salima convention in 1956, alongside political activists of different races to discuss a vision of pan-East African independence; the founding of the Lamu society for the conservation of the ancient Swahili island town, later designated a UNESCO world heritage site; the opening in 1975 of a Kenya branch of the Environment Liaison Centre. His optimism and extraordinary confidence were driven by a profound belief in the future. |An early adapter of computer-aided design, he invested with gusto in modern art and was devoted to gadgets. His grandson and dinghy crew wrote "you have always seemed the most youthful person I know."
In 2016, shortly before his ninetieth birthday, the school of architecture at Nairobi University asked to archive Richard’s drawings, as a key part of Kenya's history and some of the most requested by students. It’s a truism that an architect can never entirely leave a country, and Richard’s legacy lives in buildings that decades on remain elegant and innovative, but above all, are still used for learning, working and living.
H Richard Hughes (4 Jul 1926 – 8 Apr 2020) is survived by his second wife Kavya, his children Bridget, Penelope and Mervyn and his six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Anne Hughes died in 2006, and is remembered with love.
[1] Fiona Fitzgerald (University of Nairobi) on Richard Hughes, 198