Award-winning architect whose unconventional designs ranged from space-age homes to the Orbit tower for the London Olympic Park
The architect Kathryn Findlay, who has died aged 60 after suffering from a brain tumour, was the creator of surreal space-age houses in Japan and co-designer of the Olympic Orbit tower in London. At once earthy and high-tech, rustic and urban, the homes she built in Tokyo in the 1990s, with her then husband, Eisaku Ushida, were a physical manifesto of her future-primitive style. Recalling the mud-walled buildings of north Africa and New Mexico, crossed with something straight from the Jetsons, they appeared like otherworldly objects in the city's suburban streets.
Forming a series of cave-like spaces within a sinuous white loop, the Truss Wall House, completed in 1993, performed elaborate feats with concrete long before computer modelling made such curvaceous forms ubiquitous. It was commissioned by the owner of the Truss Wall system, a method of constructing compound curves in concrete, which until then had been used only for decorative applications, such as making rippling concrete curtains and sculptures of dragons.
Findlay and Ushida took the fantastical theme one step further, constructing a beguiling residence that could have been home to the amorphous Barbapapa family, a hollowed-out shell dotted with constellations of circular windows, complete with a terrace made of what looked like pink marshmallows. It felt half alive, and the building has since taken on a life of its own: the small planting bed has grown to engulf the house entirely with a thick cloak of ivy.
With its mop of vegetation, it recalls a second project, completed in 1994, for a client who took Salvador Dali's prophesy that the future of architecture would be "soft and hairy" as their inspiration. The resulting Soft and Hairy House rises out of the ground with pinkish rough-rendered walls, as if extruded from the earth, complete with a shaggy lawn of grass and wild flowers on top. Beneath, the warren of rounded rooms, each lined with swaths of pleated fabric, frame a courtyard where a bright blue egg pokes through the wall like some cosmic bathroom blob.
"We earned some disapproval in Japan for not being minimalists," Findlay told the Guardian earlier this year. "But you just have to keep ploughing the furrow you see ahead of you, and hope that at some point they'll understand you, and you'll understand them."
Never one to call on the conventional architectural canon or follow the rules, Findlay likened her design process to a worm eating through an apple: carving spaces out of a solid mass, rather than forming a building from the outside-in. "The shape is an outcome of the spaces and movement inside," she said. The projects were developed through lengthy iterations of model-making and what she called "slimy drawings" – pre-digital, hand-crafted axonometrics that have more in common with natural history illustrations than the sleek, seamless renderings of today's parametric modelling software.
The daughter of James, an Angus sheep farmer, and Elizabeth, Findlay was born in Finavon, Scotland. She studied at the Architectural Association in London in 1976, where she was taught by Peter Cook, founding member of the radical Archigram group, and Leon van Schaik, who inspired her interest in the idea of space as a solid matter that could be carved and sculpted.
She moved to Tokyo in 1979 to work for Arata Isozaki, a leader of the Metabolist movement, who had dreamt up fantastical plans for tree-like megastructures of clustered housing, hoisted aloft on great stalks above the city. There she met Eisaku Ushida, whom she married in 1983 and with whom she founded the Ushida Findlay Partnership in 1986. She was appointed associate professor at the University of Tokyo, the first female academic in its department of architecture – and the first foreigner to teach there since the Meiji period.
The practice relocated to the UK in 1999, and went bust in 2004 after running up debts working on three big projects in Qatar, including a beach palace for the Emir's wife, which would have risen out of the sands like a swirling propeller. With its tendril-like wings extending into the landscape, it had similarities with Findlay's radical proposal for a country house on a greenbelt site in Cheshire, a stealthy starfish scheme which won planning permission in 2000, but was never realised. Projects for a Maggie's cancer centre planned for Wishaw hospital, Lanarkshire, and a slug-shaped visitor centre on the beach in Hastings also fell by the wayside.
Findlay bounced back in 2008, with a second poolhouse project in the Chilterns, which stands as testament to what could be achieved when clients persevered, featuring an undulating thatched rooftop that hovers above above the pool in a startling vision of rustic high-tech.
Her final collaboration, on the ArcelorMittal Orbit in the Olympic Park, London, was one of her most cherished: "I loved working with Anish Kapoor," she told the Guardian. "He has an incredible sense of pure experience – of darkness and light, and of how to make an artwork as strong an experience as possible. He doesn't get caught up in detail. He captures what I try to do in architecture."
The news of Findlay's death came as the Architects' Journal awarded her the Jane Drew prize "for her outstanding contribution to the status of women in architecture". "She was one of the most talented people in British architecture," said Eva Jiricna, one of the jurors. "I hope her work will be discovered by a new generation." Ushida Findlay Architects is currently working on the remodelling of York Art Gallery, which is due for completion at the end of this year.
Findlay and Ushida separated in 1999. She is survived by her two children, Miya and Hugo.
• Kathryn Findlay, architect, born 26 January 1953; died 10 January 2014