Peter Ahrends obituary

Peter Ahrends, who has died aged 93, was a founding partner in 1961 in the architectural firm of Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK), alongside Richard Burton and Paul Koralek. The trio first met as students in 1951, while studying at the Architectural Association in London, and went on to practise together for more than 50 years, remaining lifelong friends. ABK’s workload extended from Oxford colleges to public libraries, housing, shops and industrial structures. Unusually, all three partners were involved in design. “Architecture should not be a question of whether or not we put Corinthian capitals on our facades,” they asserted. “It is about people and their lives; about making spaces that will have a living, dynamic and significant relationship with the life and activity they will contain.” Early impetus was provided by a commission for a Bond Street gallery for the art dealer John Kasmin, hailed by Forbes magazine as “London’s swingingest 60s art gallery”, and a competition win for the Berkeley Library at Trinity College Dublin. Completed in 1967, it was described by one critic as “sitting like a mooring stone at the edge of Trinity’s green, its surfaces pale and pitted, its geometry lucid as a theorem”. Made of concrete and Wicklow granite, it was strikingly and starkly modern, designed to stand its ground in the face of neoclassical neighbours. In 2025 it was renamed the Eavan Boland Library after the acclaimed Irish poet. Other notable buildings for higher education included Chichester Theological College, a punchy brutalist composition in brick and concrete, followed by a business school at Oxford University (which became Templeton College), constructed in seven phases between 1967 and 1990. A serpentine addition to Keble College (1980), also at Oxford, was a deft modern riff on William Butterfield’s polychromatic Victorian original, but ABK’s inventiveness was not confined to academia. There was housing in Basildon, Essex; an arcadian factory for Cummins,…