Ralph Erskine 1914-2005.

Ralph Erskine, who died on 16 March aged 91, was one of the greatest architects of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in London to Scottish Presbyterian socialist parents, he was educated at a Quaker school and the Regent Street Polytechnic. He went to Sweden in 1938 to study social democracy in the land of Asplund and Lewerentz. There, he married his school friend Ruth Francis, but on the outbreak of war they were isolated in neutral Sweden. Erskine, the Quaker, offered to serve as a stretcher-bearer, but the British Embassy refused to repatriate people not prepared to join the armed forces.

He bravely set up a practice and built his own house, the forerunner of a number in which he evolved an architecture responsive to Scandinavian landscape and climate (Erskine was one of the first to consciously evolve ecologically conscious buildings). In the '50s, he bought a Thames sailing barge, sailed it to the Baltic and converted it into a floating office, which every summer was sailed down the coast or into the archipelago from where the practice was conducted. With people like Giancarlo De Carlo and Aldo Van Eyck, he became a member of Team X, founded in 1956 to counter the increasing burcaucratisation of the Modern Movement, and to make human values central to architecture.

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The work grew in scope. In the 1952 cardboard factory at Fors in Dalecarlia, he first showed an affection for boldly modelled brickwork which never left him (but bold modelling was never purely formal; it was always somehow derived from function). The town centre for Kiruna in the Arctic was one of the first of many masterplanning works in which Erskine explored urban patterns that balance community and individual, artefactual and natural. He was always concerned to involve users with architecture, and his famous housing scheme at Byker in Newcastle remains one of the largest and most thorough examples of user participation in design. Its huge patterned and modelled outer brick wall was made as a barrier against an urban motorway that was never built. It shields a remarkable network of public, private and semi-private spaces (gardens, courts, terraces and balconies) that remains popular today.

The same sensibility informed the big commercial and institutional buildings. Stockholm University library and student union, the City Terminal (which incorporates a World Trade Center and a bus station--two of the nastiest twentieth-century building types, AR December 1989), and the Ark, the radical London office block (AR July 1992), all offer many kinds of space ranging from individual studies, through places for casual encounter to meeting places for many different kinds of function and levels of formality. A similar social and spatial lattice is to be found in the late housing schemes, particularly the Greenwich Millennium Village (AR January 2002) and Bo-01 in Malmo (AR July 2001). This approach has been extremely influential in Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands. But, as he would have wished, the lessons have been more moral rather than formal.

Erskine built from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. He was loaded with gold medals and other honours, but he never lost his idealistic humanism. After dissolution of his practice in 1981 and the death of his wife in 1988, he continued to design in the calm office next to his house in the beautiful garden at Drottningholm, where the barge used to be moored. The work continued to be innovative and, though executive architects carried it out, it never lost sensitive detailing or subtlety even when made using industrialised construction techniques, his buildings are a pleasure to touch. He was a delightful companion, witty and warm, never pompous, speaking in strangely old-fashioned English with quite strong Swedish inflection (though he always retained British citizenship). But, however regional his work may have been, nationality was not in the least important. He was a fine and imaginative architect who nobly championed humanity against its many twentieth-century enemies.