Richard Feilden (1950-2005).

Richard was my closest friend for 35 years; my partner for 27. Our partnership provided the initial vision for the practice and his unbounded energy was a constant driving force behind us all.

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Meeting in our first year at Cambridge in 1969, like many I was drawn to his infectious enthusiasm and optimism. Halfway through the first year he decided we should re-write the syllabus on the back of one of his Community Architecture Initiatives. For Richard, architecture was a much wider issue than what you were taught at design school.

We set up a practice, in a shop-front office in Bath, where we sold architecture by the hour--[pounds sterling]2.50 in those days--and the most important thing that drove us was the desire for change. This, and Richard's love of making and building, led us to set up our own contracting company, and then a property company with our own low energy developments, out of which emerged a set of social and environmental principles that have stayed with us over 27 years as we have grown to a practice over a hundred strong.

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Richard was a wonderful paradox, an egalitarian with Ego, a strong, single-minded leader with an almost pathological desire to consult, include and openly debate. On the one hand he was a seemingly benign dictator, and on the other obsessively democratic; his favourite phrases being 'listening and leadership'.

Richard's creative energy was at the core of so much of our best work. Not 'owning' his design work, he was an extraordinary facilitator for all of us, the wider design teams, and contractors that he enjoyed working with. He loved the collaborative effort of designing and constructing and was dismissive of the false assumption that architects as individuals are endowed with all the multi-functional skills required to undertake complex projects.

As a champion of the client's perspective in any design discussion, what he loved most was the intense personal and creative relationships that architecture brought him. This was the case with the clients at the Bridgemead Nursing Home in Bath for which we won our first RIBA Award in 1989, and for many of our University clients at Winchester, Aston, Imperial College, UCL and Queen Mary. Their recently completed Student Village turned out to be one of his favourite projects. Richard's most recent passion was the architecture of schools, which now form a significant part of the practice's workload, largely due to his personal crusade to see that the next generation of state schools is better than the last. He was, first and last, a communicator and he was dependent on communication for his own creativity. Talking through problems was the way to get them solved.

In many ways, although he died tragically young, Richard had reached a certain pinnacle through his work in the practice, and the greatest loss in terms of his potential future contributions will be sustained by the wider world beyond. I am so grateful that we won so many plaudits at the Building Design Awards just two months ago--four out of 14 different categories including Architect of the Year. Richard so enjoyed that evening, arriving as usual on a Brompton and turning up in the Hilton ballroom with his trousers tucked into his socks, and departing somewhat intoxicated and imbalanced with a whole load of metal trophies in his saddlebag.

If we detach ourselves from the horror of the event, Richard could be said to have died an appropriately dramatic death; killed by a falling tree in the woodland he loved while creating a glade in memory of his father. The real tragedy for the world of architecture, and his wife Tish and his family Rowan, Fergus and Jamic, is that it happened 30 years too early.