Richard Seifert (architect)
Richard Seifert (born Reuben Seifert , later Robin Seifert , born November 25, 1910 in Zurich , Switzerland ; † October 26, 2001 in London ) was a Swiss- British architect . In the 1960s and 1970s, Seifert was considered one of the most important architects for high-rise office buildings in London and other European cities.
Life
childhood and education
Richard was one of ten children of a Swiss- Jewish family, the father was a cinema owner in Zurich. The family later moved to London. Richard had an early desire to become an architect and in 1927 won a scholarship to the Bartlett School of Architecture , the architecture faculty of University College London . He completed his studies in 1933 and after short internships started his own business as a surveyor and architecture assistant. His first designs were flat-rate commissions for modest residential construction projects in north London. In 1936 he married his wife Josephine, with whom he had children Anne, John and Brian.
During World War II , Seifert served in India and Burma with the Royal Engineers , the British Army's pioneering group , and achieved the rank of colonel . In 1946 he returned to civilian life and resumed his work in London. His military rank of Colonel became his nickname .
job
The UK's first post-war governments gave priority to repairing war damage and rebuilding destroyed residential and commercial buildings over new construction and therefore severely restricted access to building materials. After the restrictions were lifted in the mid-1950s, a real construction boom for office buildings broke out in central London and the West End , which completely changed the face of central London in just a few years.
During this time Seifert received orders from the real estate agent Felix Fenston , whom he may have known through family connections. Fenston was of Swiss Jewish descent, his father was a theater director and dealer, naturalized as a British shortly before Felix was born. Through Fenston, Seifert made the acquaintance of real estate agent Harry Hyams , who later became known as an art collector and possibly the richest man in Great Britain. Hyams awarded Seifert the contract to build the Center Point office tower , with which he achieved his career breakthrough. In 1958 Seifert founded his own office, R Seifert & Partners , in which he held 80% and his partners Tony Henderson and George Marsh each with 10%. In addition to the overall management of the office, Seifert took care of the contacts with the building owners and negotiations with town planning and building authorities. George Marsh, whose work was influenced by Marcel Breuer , the inventor of tubular steel furniture, the Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer and the Italian Gio Ponti , was mainly responsible for the appearance of the high-rise buildings from Seifert's office .
Richard Seifert's architecture firm had 300 employees in the 1970s and was one of the largest and most commercially successful in Great Britain. It was taken over in 1984 by his son John, also a Bartlett graduate.
Private life
After the Second World War, Seifert bought a modest semi-detached house in Mill Hill, north London, which would remain his home until his death. During his most active years, he enlarged it by buying three neighboring lots and demolishing their buildings to make way for an extension that also included a 12,000 square meter garden where he would later build a second home for his daughter Anne and his Grandchildren built.
plant
In the five decades of his career as an architect, Richard Seifert has become one of Britain's most important commercial architects through good relationships and hard work . In total, he designed around 500 office buildings in the UK and Europe. He was known for his speed and his virtuoso mastery of planning law, which in some cases he knew better than the representatives of the authorities. He was a leader in his field, particularly from the early 1960s to the beginning of his retirement in the 1980s. His work had a dominant influence on the London skyline due to the large number of high-rise buildings he created .
But Seifert was also sharply criticized, partly because of the aesthetics of its buildings, partly because of its close integration into the system of exclusively profit-oriented real estate development. His work was based on a close relationship with the client and the focus on commercial aspects. This contradicted the welfare state-oriented architecture of the post-war period, as represented by Frederick Gibberd and Basil Spence .
Seifert's early work included a large factory building for Rival Lamps in 1947 and an imposing neoclassical building for Woolworths on Marylebone Road in 1956. In 1960 his office created the first spectacular designs such as Tolworth House, a 22-story reinforced concrete office building on the Kingston bypass , or the circular space house outside Kingsway in Camden , completed in 1962.
His most famous building is probably the Center Point skyscraper, completed in 1966 , which Seifert built for real estate tycoon Harry Hyams. The tallest building in London at the time stood empty for 15 years until a tenant was found in the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) who was willing to take over the entire 33-story building.
As the orders for the office grew and Seifert was able to post ever greater successes, he came into conflict with citizen movements, militant urban planners, environmentalists and the Royal Fine Art Commission (RFAC), a government committee with an advisory role for architecture, urban planning and Design of public space. This resulted in a 150-story skyscraper in Liverpool not being built.
Seifert's last major structure was the 183-meter-high Natwest Tower, later renamed Tower 42 . Bureaucratic opposition to the building meant that planning took ten years. As a result, the building was already considered obsolete shortly after it opened in 1981 because there was no space for cabling and air conditioning for the information technology , which was still new at the time . Nevertheless, the building had some groundbreaking innovations. When it opened, the Natwest Tower was by far the tallest building in London.
In the 1980s, Seifert planned a 139-story skyscraper for Melbourne , which at the time would have been the tallest building in the world. The plans for the high-rise building with a diamond-shaped floor plan were not implemented.
List of works
- Rival Lamps Factory, Brighton , 1947
- Woolworths House, London, 1956
- Space House, London, 1962 - renamed One Kemble Street
- Center Point , London, 1966
- Royal Garden Hotel, London, 1966
- Sussex Heights, Brighton, 1968
- Tolworth Tower, Kingston-upon-Thames, 1968
- Concourse House, Liverpool, canceled 1969 - 2009
- NLA Tower, Croydon, 1970
- Sobell Sports Center, London, 1973
- Wembley Conference Center , 1977 - canceled
- Princess Grace Hospital, London 1977
- Euston Railway Station , London, 1978 - partially abandoned
- Natwest Tower , London, 1981 - renamed Tower 42
Pictures of the works
Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington , London
Sussex Height, Brighton
Concourse House, Liverpool
Euston Railway Station , London
Princess Grace Hospital, London
Natwest Tower , London
.JPG)
.jpg)
Web links
- R. Seifert & Partners. In: Emporis. 2020(English).
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Martin Pawley: Obituary: Richard Seifert . In: The Guardian . October 29, 2001, ISSN 0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed April 16, 2020]).
- ↑ a b c d e Ewan M. Harrison: Richard Seifert (1910-2001). In: The Architectural Review. Retrieved April 18, 2020 (English).
- ↑ Fenston, Felix Donovan (1915-1970), property developer. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved April 20, 2020 (English).
- ↑ Harry Hyams. In: Jewish Lives Project. Retrieved April 20, 2020 (English).
- ↑ 1970s / 1980s: Richard Seifert (1910–2001). In: Building. June 23, 2006, accessed April 21, 2020 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Seifert, Richard |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Seifert, Reuben |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swiss-British architect |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 25, 1910 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Zurich |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 26, 2001 |
| Place of death | London |