My father, Nathan Silver, who has died aged 89, was a distinguished architect, educator and author. His most enduring contribution to architectural history was Lost New York (1967), which was nominated for a US National Book award. It became a cultural phenomenon and helped establish the framework for New York’s landmarks law (1965) and similar preservation efforts worldwide.
Nathan also co-authored Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (1972) with Charles Jencks, and wrote several other influential texts on architecture, including The Making of Beaubourg: A Building Biography of the Centre Pompidou Paris (1994).
Born in New York to Libby (nee Nachimowsky), a teacher, and Isaac Silver, also a teacher who later became an architect, Nathan went to Stuyvesant high school and then studied at the Cooper Union school of architecture and Columbia University. Moving to London in the mid-1960s, Nathan joined the architecture faculty at Cambridge University, and later served as head of the department of architecture at the Polytechnic of East London (now the University of East London).
His architectural work included partnerships in national British firms, and his own practice – he designed, among other projects, Prue Leith’s restaurant in Notting Hill. Nathan also served as a regular architectural correspondent for the New Statesman, and was a judge for many architectural competitions; he was a professional assessor for applications to the Heritage Lottery Fund, and was a member of the executive committee of the Westminster Society.
Nathan’s work bridged the gaps between academic architectural history and popular understanding, making the case for preservation accessible to wider audiences. He set up a theatrical and television production company, Dramatis Personae, with the actor and director Maria Aitken, loved opera and served as a juror for the Olivier awards.
In recent years he helped his wife, Roxy Beaujolais, whom he married 1994, run her pub, the Seven Stars, situated behind the Royal Courts of Justice in central London. Following Nathan’s respectful but highly idiosyncratic interior redesign of the pub, which is in a listed building from 1602, the Seven Stars won the title of Time Out pub of the year in 2003.
In 1973, Nathan married Helen McNeil, an academic and author, and they had two children. They divorced in 1980. He is survived by Roxy, the children of his first marriage, Liberty and me, four grandchildren, and his brother, Robert.
