1947-2018

Born in Northampton, England, on 12 December 1947, William Allen Alsop – Will Alsop – passed away on 12 May 2018. Trained in London at the Architectural Association, Alsop showed signs of his creative talent early on when, at just 23, he came in second in the competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Upon graduating, he collaborated with two legends of British modernity, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, and then went on to work four years with Cedric Price. In 1981 he set up his own studio and began a solo career defined by formal risk, iconoclasm, and controversy derived from his tenacious surrealism, materialized in buildings like the Ferry Terminal in Hamburg (1993), the Sharp Center for Design in Ontario (2004), or Peckham Library in London, for which he received the Stirling Prize in 2000. Alsop made the construction of buildings compatible with the design of urban regeneration plans (like those of Rotterdam, Groningen, and Manchester), and also with teaching at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and the Technische Schüle in Vienna, among other institutions. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.