When in 1983 Michael Manser became president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, he promised to raise its profile in the media. He was shocked, nevertheless, when at the institute’s 150th anniversary celebrations at Hampton Court the following year he was upstaged by the Prince of Wales, whose speech likened a proposed design by Peter Ahrends for an extension at the National Gallery to “a monstrous carbuncle”.
Manser, who has died aged 87, contemplated a counterattack then and there but, ever the diplomat, feared turning the ruined evening into a rancorous disaster. He later regretted this. Thereafter always ready with a riposte, he remained true to his principles of a clean, elegant modern architecture, and his practice was in the forefront of the reaction against postmodernism in the 1990s. He will be remembered, too, for designing houses that defined 1960s living at its most sophisticated.
Michael was born in Bristol, the son of Augusta (nee Bonde), and Edmund, a travelling salesman. The architect Reginald Vaughan was a family friend who encouraged the boy’s interest in the subject and recommended that he study at Regent Street Polytechnic, now part of the University of Westminster. A part-time tutor there was the engineer Ove Arup, who was impressed by Manser’s project for a flour mill and nurtured his interest in steel structures, encouraging him to look at the work of Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. It was not until the 1960s, however, that Manser saw their elegant steel-framed houses for himself.
Meanwhile, Vaughan secured for him an architect’s pass to the site of the Festival of Britain, and Manser watched from the royal box while the Royal Festival Hall was being fine-tuned for opening.
His first house, in 1954, was for his parents, under Vaughan’s supervision. After qualifying that year, and national service with the Royal Engineers, he went to work for Norman & Dawbarn, designers of BBC Television Centre and specialists in airport buildings, who had expanded into schools, research laboratories and hospital buildings.
In 1953, Manser had married Dolores Josephine Bernini, known as José, an architectural critic, and by 1958 they had two small children. When he asked for a pay rise, Graham Dawbarn agreed, but packed the family off to Jamaica so that Manser could design a university and hospital. While there, he wrote a piece for the Architects’ Journal on building in the West Indies. In it he revealed how the British government was pumping money into projects to support the short-lived West Indies Federation. Dawbarn recalled Manser instantly and dropped him, leaving the family jobless and homeless.
Ironically, journalism was to be the saviour of the family fortunes, for both José and Michael. The designer David Papworth introduced them to Home, an expanding women’s magazine that was adding serious articles on modern houses to the standard fare of recipes and knitting patterns. The Home assignments also introduced the couple to future clients.
In 1960 Manser began his own practice, which was joined by Peter Turnbull in 1964, and he also became architectural correspondent for the Observer and the monthly magazine Architectural Design. Meanwhile, he and José invested their savings in an orchard plot in Leatherhead, Surrey, and designed a single-storey house around a courtyard, an English counterpart to the steel-framed bungalows promoted in American architectural magazines.
About 40 houses followed, the most dramatic for Papworth, who bought a site in Godalming deemed by other architects too steep to build on. Manser brought in the engineer Jack Dawson, and by carving a shelf out of the hillside they cantilevered a steel-framed house, which they named Cliffhanger (1962).
Other houses designed with Dawson included Forest Lodge (1967), Ashtead, Surrey, elegantly clad in dark glass panels, and Capel Manor (1970) in Horsmonden, Kent, a glass box perched on the foundations of a Victorian mansion for John Howard, then parliamentary private secretary to Edward Heath. Both are now listed buildings.
Turnbull was a devout Baptist and the practice designed two churches, in Wye Street, Battersea, and at Waterlooville, Hampshire, before his early death. The palette of steel and glass was appropriately restrained here, combined with brick, but it could also be joyous, as at Horniman primary school in Forest Hill, south London, clad in brightly coloured panels for the Greater London council. Turnbull died in 1971, but large commissions nevertheless came in, among them an extension in mirror glass to the 18th-century Thorncroft Manor, Leatherhead, Surrey, that was deferential to the listed building yet resolutely modern.
Manser had little time for planners and lay committees, who he felt stifled the architectural profession, arguing that architectural variety gave Britain its character. Prince Charles’s interventions only enforced this concern. Yet Manser’s most important public buildings were still to be realised. In 1984 he was joined by his son, Jonathan (his daughter Victoria has her own firm), and the Manser Practice, as it became, produced a series of high-profile buildings related to the transport industry.
First, in 1990, it built a VIP centre at Heathrow’s Terminal 4; that it would be used by Prince Charles was not lost on the press. This was followed by the elegant white steel Hilton nearby, and a steel and glass terminal building at Southampton airport, Eastleigh (1994), that itself resembles a jumbo poised for takeoff. Although Manser left the direction of the practice to Jonathan in 1999, he remained its chairman until his death, and the Twentieth Century Society’s casework benefited from his silky committee skills.
There were also more houses, many on the Isle of Wight where the family pursued its passion for sailing. In 2001 the Manser Medal (now the RIBA’s House of the Year award) was created in his honour as long-term chairman of the National HomeBuilder Design Awards for the United Kingdom’s best new house.
He is survived by José, Jonathan and Victoria.
• Michael Manser, architect, born 23 March 1929; died 8 June 2016
