The following year he joined Dr Alwyn Lloyd, a past president of the Town Planning Institute, in partnership. On demobilisation he entered the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff, now part of the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology, where he gained a diploma with special distinction in 1948. In 1936, while a student, he won the lord mayor's competition for the design of street decorations in Cardiff for the Coronation.Īt the outbreak of war he was commissioned into the Royal Engineers and served in Northern Ireland and Palestine. In 1935 he was articled to Swansea borough architect's department and studied part time to pass the RIBA intermediate examination externally. He attended Swansea grammar school, where his contemporaries included Dylan Thomas, Mervyn Levy and the composer Daniel Jones. He always considered himself a naturalised Welshman, indeed most believed him to be Welsh. Gordon was born in Ayr and moved with his family to Swansea in 1925. "My image is the apotheosis of team working, the antithesis of the prima donna: I am not a flamboyant person - I wear plain grey suits and no coloured shirts." He brought to RIBA a formal, bureaucratic style of management at a time when the profession desperately needed charismatic leadership. A shy and very private man, he admitted that he had to force himself to go out into the open. Gordon had succeeded the eminent architect Peter Shepheard, but where Shepheard had been chosen by the institute's council for his standing as a designer, Gordon rose through the regional structure. This initiative shines out as one of the few attempts by a RIBA president of the time to address national problems. In the climate of the time it fell largely on deaf ears. His greatest contribution was a prophetic paper launched at the RIBA conference in 1972, two years before the major world oil crisis: Long Life, Loose Fit, Low Energy in today's language, sustainability, flexibility and energy efficiency. Alex Gordon, the distinguished Welsh architect who has died aged 82, became president of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1971 during one of the worst recessions to hit the profession since the second world war.
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