Robin Spence, who has died aged 79, was a talented architect, whom I first met in 1958 at Cambridge University, where we both studied. After university, he travelled in the US, working for a period for the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago, where he was greatly influenced by the architect and designer Myron Goldsmith and the structural engineer Fazlur Khan.
On his return to London, he worked with Douglas Stephen, and designed a couple of radical steel framed houses in Hunstanton, Norfolk, and Cambridge. We met up again to enter architectural competitions together, winning the international competition for a new parliamentary building in 1972, which we drew up in his dining room.
This success allowed us to form a partnership, Spence + Webster Architects, and although the parliament building was quietly dropped in 1976, we continued in practice together until 1984. We designed housing at Central Milton Keynes, the psychology department at the University of Warwick, Ross Hall hospital in Glasgow, and a couple of steel-framed courtyard houses in Belsize Park Gardens, north London, where we both lived for a while.
Robin was born in London, the son of Gerald Spence, an RAF officer, and his wife, Sybil (nee Jarvis). Robin’s uncle was the architect Sir Basil Spence, who encouraged Robin from an early age to develop his artistic side. After leaving Bedford school, at his father’s wish Robin started aeronautical engineering at RAF Henlow, but after a couple of years left for Norwich Art School, then Queens’ College, Cambridge.
He was a principled and determined designer, greatly influenced by Mies van der Rohe, and he strongly believed that architecture should be the honest expression of a building’s structure, materials and construction. He declined to work for clients who were not interested in “proper architecture”. He felt that the quality of his work was evident and was not interested in self-promotion.
Robin continued to practise until recently as Robin Spence Architects, working from Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, where he was also an active member of the Shoreham Society. Among his later projects were brilliantly designed residences in Cornwall and West Sussex.
Robin was also a talented artist, and produced many luminous coloured pencil drawings of holidays in Greece, as well as more abstract watercolours. He was an enthusiastic windsurfer, and latterly he also gave lessons in tango dancing, which he perceived as another serious art form.
He is survived by his second wife, Delia, whom he married in 1982, and by a son and granddaughter from his first marriage, to Janet, which ended in divorce. A daughter, Melissa, died in 2013.
